Media: Techne Connect Podcast Features Vigilant Aerospace CEO Kraettli Epperson

Joe Reed:
Kraettli, thank you for your time today. It’s great to talk with you again. How have you been?

Kraettli Epperson:
Very good. Great to talk with you, Joe.

Joe Reed:
For the audience today, could you please provide a quick introduction on who you are and what exactly your company does?

Kraettli Epperson:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m Kraettli Epperson. I am the CEO and co-founder of a company called Vigilant Aerospace. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’ve been involved in starting technology companies for more than 20 years now. I’ve done a little bit of angel investing along the way as well.

But I have mostly worked in companies that are at some sort of technological frontier, really focused on better enabling access to technology and leveling the playing field for all kinds of users of technology. That’s really what my career has been focused on.

At Vigilant Aerospace, we develop both airspace management and collision avoidance systems for drones. We’re a leading company that builds those types of systems, so we’re really focused on aviation safety. Fundamentally, it’s about enabling the use of autonomous aircraft for all kinds of purposes, making that safe, making it possible under the regulations, and making it practical. So that’s what we do.

Joe Reed:
That’s so interesting. When you started that journey, because it’s quite a niche skill set and also a niche type of company, it’s not something anyone could just create tomorrow, when you look back on your career, what would you say were the early influences that hinted you had an entrepreneurial spirit, but also that you wanted to go down this path?

Kraettli Epperson:
Yeah. When I was in college, I had a couple of crucial opportunities that I took. I was very interested in journalism, and so I became editor-in-chief of my university newspaper with a good friend of mine. We were co-editors of the newspaper.

That was really one of my earliest exposures to leadership because we had to juggle a lot of things. We had a lot of technology in the office. We had a whole staff of writers. We had to make sure we were bringing in enough income to be able to pay for the newspaper to be published. So it was a lot of exposure to the inside finances of that organization, and I was fascinated by that.

Simultaneously, I had a chance to work, initially as a receptionist, for a tech startup in Houston, not too far from my university, that was founded by several people who were older than I was. They were recent graduates, and they needed somebody to answer the phone. I was doing my homework, but when I got bored of that, they said, “Well, we have this technical problem.”

This was kind of the early internet. They were trying to find a way to publish SEC filings, particularly quarterly stock filings and things like that, and make them accessible to end users in a structured way so they could automatically pull down the things they needed to do investment analysis.

I said, “Well, that’s a really interesting problem.” So I taught myself how to write the software to do that on their platform, and then ended up writing that software while I was answering the phone, basically. That ended up being written up in PC Magazine and becoming something important for them. Eventually, I became the product manager of that company.

Joe Reed:
Wow, that’s so interesting. It’s funny that you said that. My dad always used to tell me, as a kid, when computers first started becoming more common and all the different languages came out, that even though he wasn’t technical himself, he was fascinated by the idea of building your own projects digitally. He’d done something similar to that, but probably not to the same extent you did.

What language were you using at that time?

Kraettli Epperson:
It was a mix of Rexx and Perl.

Joe Reed:
Yeah, I’m not too familiar with that.

Kraettli Epperson:
Some people might still know what Perl is. Perl still exists at the corners of the internet, but it’s been replaced by Python pretty much universally.

Joe Reed:
Yeah. So that was the first startup experience that you had. After that, you actually went on to co-found your own company. Is that correct?

Kraettli Epperson:
Yeah. After that, I went on to a company called MannerNet in London. It was an opportunity for me to work abroad, so I left Houston and worked with a company that was doing application hosting, again in the early internet era, a little further along.

There was huge interest in London and Europe generally in the ability to use the internet to move data. So we were building encrypted databases for big corporations and managing remote, very sensitive email accounts for mostly people who were negotiating deals in Beijing and Hanoi and a variety of other places where they needed very secure email.

That was a great education and a great opportunity to work for several years in London.

After that, I came back and co-founded another company, the Questia Media Company. That company built one of the earliest and largest academic digital libraries. We ended up scanning tens of thousands of books after negotiating with publishers. We had licensing and publishing agreements with major publishers, and we had offices in Houston, Manhattan, London, and Manila because we had a lot of scanning activities outside the U.S. in order to get all of those books into a massive database.

That company got very large very quickly. I was one of three co-founders in basically a small room. We started out with one server that I bought out of my checking account, built a prototype, and were able to raise some money. Ultimately, that company had 300 employees, and we were able to exit that business. It eventually became the backbone of a company called Cengage, which is a digital academic library that many students use today. So that was the genesis of that library.

Joe Reed:
Wow, that’s so interesting. When you think about the journey from startup to a well-established business, a lot of people listening now would probably dream of someday owning a business or being part of a business that scales to that size. But rarely do they think about the personal sacrifice and trade-offs, because at the end of the day, it’s not going to be a nine-to-five to get you from A to B on that journey, is it?

So for you, what did you have to give up, or what were some of those trade-offs you had to make?

Kraettli Epperson:
Particularly early on, there were a lot of late nights and a lot of weekends that you end up working. In several of the businesses I’ve been involved in, including the one I’m involved in right now, there’s a lot of travel, so you are out of town quite a lot.

Of course, over time, after you’ve done this for a while, you learn to create balance. You learn to find ways to have outside activities that can help you turn off the obsessive business focus that you certainly have and exercise as a startup founder.

So I certainly have outside activities, but yes, you end up being very, very focused, and that’s really what it requires. You’re doing a lot of problem-solving, and you have to be very resilient because you’ll often run into obstacles that you really have to navigate around, whether they’re technical obstacles, hiring, funding, dealing with different types of partnerships, or clients that don’t do what you expect them to do. You’ve just got to be able to be resilient.

Joe Reed:
Definitely. When you talked about being able to switch yourself off from work, who are you outside of work?

Kraettli Epperson:
I have a wife and a couple of kids. I very much enjoy participating in and watching the many musical performances, musical theater performances, and other activities that my kids have been involved in over the years. That’s a really important thing for me, and it’s very much disconnected from work. It’s just fantastic to be able to observe your kids growing up, and I’ve been privileged to be able to do that and to have the flexibility and time to do as much of that as I can.

I’ll also say I’m a very outdoorsy person. I grew up and continue living in Oklahoma and Texas, so I spend a lot of time outdoors, whether that’s camping or hiking. That’s an important thing to me outside of work. I’m very focused on my family when I’m not at the office.

Joe Reed:
Yeah, it’s definitely important to have that balance. It’s unfortunate that you hear about a lot of people who treat their work life as that’s it, full stop. That is their life. They live to work, not work to live.

When we think about lessons from failure, I’m sure that even though the company was a huge success, there were probably a lot of times where you had to fail fast. If we look throughout your whole career, what would you say were some of the early mistakes that ended up becoming some of the biggest lessons in your career?

Kraettli Epperson:
There have definitely been some expensive lessons. I’ve spent time both building my own companies and advising and investing in other companies.

I spend most of my time running companies because I’ve found I like that very active role. I like to be able to control my destiny. I like to help set strategy. That’s really one of my major focus areas, and it’s also the area where I often get asked to advise other companies.

I’ve certainly had some investments I made, particularly as an angel investor, where the strategy was not fully fleshed out or not fully executed. That’s been very expensive.

And of course, within a company, as a startup founder, you end up having to change direction, particularly as technology changes and as regulations change. I currently work in a company that operates in a regulated industry, so we have to play a bit of a guessing game about where the regulations are going to be a few years from now.

Some of your audience are probably engineers or people who work with a wide variety of vehicles, civil engineering, or other things where the technology is constantly changing and you have to keep up. I’ve been in situations where we didn’t keep up, where we sold a variety of products and then got lapped. We got overtaken by changes in the industry. You have to go back and reinvest, and you have to do that constantly, which I learned the hard way.

That’s what I do now. We’re constantly reinvesting because we know we have to stay ahead of the curve and be at the leading edge in order to remain competitive. That can be a very expensive lesson until you’ve really taken it to heart and built a company that can continuously innovate.

Joe Reed:
Definitely. If we focus on your personal mission as of today and the company that you’re building and have built for years now, why Vigilant Aerospace Systems, and why now?

Kraettli Epperson:
Sure. Vigilant is a really interesting company. It’s a company I’ve been involved with for a while now. One of the main reasons it fits so well with my career is because it operates in a heavily regulated industry. Aviation moves relatively slowly compared to some other industries, so you really have to stay on top of the rules, and you have to develop essentially to the regulations. That takes the pace that it takes.

Personally, our mission here as a company is very much about enabling the future of autonomous systems. Drones are basically flying robots, and as we like to say, there is no autonomy without autonomous safety. That’s really what we focus on, and it’s what we think about all day.

What I think about is how to enable the industry, how to enable people who want to work at the cutting edge and at the frontier of what the technology is capable of, and what they need in order to do that. So that’s very much my personal mission. It’s also the mission of the company.

It’s a question of how we enable the next generation of autonomy. It’s going to happen. We’re in the midst of an AI revolution. We are in the midst of an autonomous systems revolution. As AI begins to move out of the browser and out of language models and into large-scale, real-world physics and machine learning, as it already rapidly is doing, suddenly we’re going to have autonomy all around us all the time.

I’m fascinated by that. I’m a very curious person. I’ve enjoyed my career working around startups and technology because it’s allowed me to learn a lot of new things and then apply the lessons I’ve learned from prior startups to new startups, and enable those startups with valid strategy, valid markets, and products that solve the right problem for that industry at that moment.

That’s my mission. That’s what I love doing.

Joe Reed:
Learning new things, curiosity. Thank you for sharing that with everyone.

If we were to focus on the industry as a whole, how do you think it’s going to evolve over the next couple of years?

Kraettli Epperson:
The industry, particularly autonomous aviation, is really divided into several segments.

We often think about autonomous aviation and uncrewed aircraft systems as small drones, the small handheld or somewhat larger drones that are able to go out and make observations, take pictures of a construction site or a flood or a fire, or even deliver small goods.

There is an important part of the industry around small UAS, or small drones, that’s developing quite rapidly right now. There are new rules that the FAA in the United States has drafted and published in draft form, and those are currently under review.

I was actually on the Aviation Rulemaking Committee that wrote those new beyond visual line of sight rules. We drafted that several years ago, in 2022 and 2023, and the FAA then worked on those and published them as the new rules for flying drones autonomously over much longer distances.

Up to this point in the U.S., a small drone had to be within the line of sight of the pilot. You had to watch your drone. You could fly it anywhere you could see it, basically, without interfering with other traffic or being inside controlled airport airspace, for example, but you couldn’t fly it beyond visual line of sight. These rules are about enabling that. It’s a very important potential change in the industry for small drones in the U.S.

We’re also focused on large drones, including military drones and what’s called advanced air mobility, things like air taxis or large cargo drones that might deliver goods over longer distances. Both of those segments of the industry are changing a lot. They’re changing in the U.S., in the UK, and in Europe quite rapidly.

I serve on the F38 Committee of ASTM, which is an international technical standards body. One of the things I love about that is I get briefed on not only what’s happening in the U.S., but also what’s happening in Canada, Mexico, the UK, the rest of Europe, and elsewhere. The Swiss are very active. There are fascinating programs going on in Japan. So there’s a lot going on throughout the world.

The industry is really rapidly moving toward rules catching up with the capabilities of the technology. We’re going to expect to see a lot more autonomy, a lot more drones overhead, and particularly in emergencies or urgent situations, you’re going to be able to have a drone respond.

Joe Reed:
Yeah, that’s very exciting. I thought it was really interesting how, with this company, one of the strategies has been to become part of committees and always stay ahead of the curve. Do you think that decision was influenced by your previous experiences with companies, and by the importance of regulations and always staying ahead?

Kraettli Epperson:
Yeah. I had some experience before this company with government contracting. I owned a company that did geospatial information systems, and often our customers were government agencies that needed to map out large-scale projects.

For example, we built the software that tracked a billion-dollar rail expansion. Houston was one of the few major U.S. cities that did not have an extensive rail network, so the Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority was working on developing that with a mix of local, state, and federal leadership and funding. That gave me exposure to government contracting and all the things involved in that.

That carried straight through to the types of things we do here at Vigilant. In aviation, it became imperative that we understand what the regulations were. It turns out that the regulations often reference industry consensus standards. Those are standards that emerge not just from the regulator deciding what they are going to regulate, but from industry saying, “This is what we believe safety is. This is what we believe the technology is capable of.”

The FAA can then reference those highly detailed technical standards and say, “You as a provider of technology in this industry can come to us and prove that your technology meets the safety standard we require,” or you can follow the published technical standard and demonstrate that it meets that standard following the standards process. That process lays out guideposts for you, which is typically much easier for industry.

We realized very early that this was absolutely critical to understanding those regulations and actually delivering products that people could use.

Joe Reed:
Certainly. Due to industry evolution, if we were to give some advice to people who are either at the start of their journey or maybe five or ten years in, but looking at what skill sets are going to be critical for them to succeed in this industry, maybe from an engineer’s perspective and then also from a general perspective, what would you say?

Kraettli Epperson:
Absolutely. This isn’t unique advice, but I think it’s worth repeating.

The engineers who do well are obviously engineers who can learn new things quickly, who can synthesize a lot of information, and who are willing and capable of working across domains.

For example, we have engineers who study and read the regulations, read the technical standards, and then work on product development. They understand why a feature they’re developing is important and how an end user might use it to meet a particular safety or regulatory need.

Engineers who can perform across those different types of tasks really bring a lot to the table. They’re very competitive. They’re the people you want on your team.

The other thing, again not unique advice from me but worth repeating because it’s really important, is communication. Engineers who can communicate, who can explain why their project or effort is important, and who can communicate that across other teams and units to people who might not understand how it fits into the bigger picture, are incredibly valuable.

The ability to do that makes an engineer much more competitive and can dramatically expand a career because you will be in a position to exercise more leadership and take on more responsibility.

Lots of engineers have the raw skills, and that’s incredibly important. We hire people who absolutely have to have those raw skills. There’s a lot of math and a lot of algorithmic work that we have to do, and some very complex geometry to do the type of work we do.

But because we’re a small team working at an industry frontier, we also have to be able to communicate across the team about why what we’re doing matters and how it all fits together. That’s my career advice specifically for engineers and technical people.

Joe Reed:
Thank you for sharing that. If we spotlight the company itself right now and focus on the business mission and vision, how would you describe that as of 2026? I’m sure it has probably evolved over the years. Also, what gap or pain point is the company trying to solve right now?

Kraettli Epperson:
Sure. As I said earlier, we’re focused on autonomous safety, or safety for autonomous systems.

More specifically, we’re focused on an area called detect-and-avoid. This is the ability to use sensors, either on the ground or on an autonomous aircraft, to detect, track, and ultimately avoid encounters with other aircraft.

We’re most concerned about crewed aircraft and passenger aircraft, but also about the ability to avoid other autonomous aircraft and uncrewed aircraft. The company’s focus is on developing the software that makes that happen.

We don’t manufacture the hardware. We work with several sensor manufacturers who are experts in developing transponder receivers, radios that can pick up aircraft transponders over very long distances. We use that information and place those systems either on the ground or on the drone itself.

We also use radars, for example either large trailer-based radars for large-scale ground-based systems, or smaller radars depending on the application. We operate a large system in western Oklahoma right now that is ultimately going to have seven radars and cover tens of thousands of square kilometers of operating space. We have another system in North Dakota in Grand Forks, and then we have other systems in discussion throughout the U.S. and elsewhere.

We also have onboard systems. Readers may have seen in our blog posts that we’ve talked a bit about onboard technology developed with small single-board computers. Those use one or two very small onboard radars, onboard transponder receivers, and direct integration with an autopilot so that the aircraft itself is carrying all of its sensors over potentially very long distances and is able to do that safety function onboard.

You’ve got to be able to know where other aircraft are, detect them in enough time, do the calculation, and determine that an aircraft is going to get too close to you, or that you’re going to get too close to it, and then follow an industry-accepted avoidance maneuver. Often you’ll turn left, get out of the way of the other aircraft, and keep a safe distance.

That’s really what we’re focused on as a company, that detect-and-avoid process. For the ground-based systems, it’s the same thing, but it supports aircraft that may not have those sensors onboard, and instead uses large radars or smaller radars on the ground. So that’s what we do. We write that software.

Joe Reed:
If we look forward 12 to 24 months, how do you envision the business growing? Is that hiring, expanding the team to multiple locations, or breaking into new markets?

Kraettli Epperson:
Absolutely. We expect there’s going to be expanded interest in and demand for the onboard system I described.

We announced a project earlier this year that we had been awarded to develop essentially a civilian version of our U.S. Air Force onboard system. That’s exciting. It gets into what are called dual-use ventures or dual-use technologies, where you have commercial technologies that become useful for defense purposes, or defense technologies that become useful in the commercial market, which often happens in aviation.

As a company, we are interested in growing, particularly by hiring additional engineers who can bridge the gaps I’ve described, thinking about the big picture, communicating it clearly, and doing the advanced aviation-specific thinking and calculations that are required.

We also expect that we’ll probably be looking at more international sales. We don’t have an international office right now, but that is likely to happen over the next year or two because there is a lot of international need for the type of safety that we provide.

We’re continuing to expand along those two product lines, and we’ll see where that takes us.

Joe Reed:
If someone were to join the company right now, how would you describe what makes it an exciting place to join?

Kraettli Epperson:
We talk to our employees about this, and we recruit very much around the idea of doing cutting-edge work.

This is a company that gives you an opportunity to learn new things and to work on pioneering solutions to problems that have not yet been solved. It gives you an opportunity to have a big impact on the world of autonomous vehicles. This is really the future of robotics at its core.

Anyone who has an interest in those things would find that this company offers a great opportunity. A lot of our engineers spend a significant amount of their time on self-selected work. We look at problems, we look at the skills and capabilities we have, and then we prioritize assignments around who is most interested and best equipped to work on a particular emerging problem or product feature.

As a small company, everybody has to make big contributions and a lot of their own decisions. It’s one of the big advantages of working at a boutique software shop. You get those chances to exercise leadership much earlier in your career.

Joe Reed:
That brings me to the next set of questions around culture and values. You mentioned it’s something of a startup environment, but how would you describe the culture, and why do people love working there?

Kraettli Epperson:
For us, it starts with a safety mission. That very much informs our culture.

We have a culture of what I would call radical candor. If something doesn’t work, we’re going to say it doesn’t work. If something is more difficult than we thought it would be, that’s not a problem. Every time we solve a difficult problem inside our company, that creates more competitive advantage and more intellectual property for the company.

We love hard problems. When a developer works on something and runs into challenges, we relish that. When we think about our culture, we’re often thinking about what the next big problem is and what the most interesting thing is that we could be working on. That really informs our development culture.

In terms of sales, it’s very similar. You really can’t fake it. There’s a lot of vaporware in aviation. Aviation is especially bad for that. We have to demonstrate what we claim we can provide and sell. Some of the programs I’ve talked about really are experimentation, testing, and demonstration programs, because people want to see it working.

We love that. All of our engineers get an opportunity to go out in the field, work with the actual equipment, work with our partners who are often flying the drones, work with the U.S. Air Force, for example, and be in situations where they have exposure to the real deal at the cutting edge of the industry.

You really can’t fake it. There’s no way. On the sales side, in addition to the engineering side, we have to be very earnest and very honest about where particular products are in their development cycle, because people will say, “That’s great, I want you to come out to this airport and demonstrate it.” So we have to be prepared to do that.

It’s a challenge, but it’s an important part of our culture.

Joe Reed:
When you look at behaviors and mindsets for engineers, but also for commercial roles, what is it you look for and why?

Kraettli Epperson:
One of the top questions we ask people is to give us examples of when they had to learn something new quickly and when they had to demonstrate a lot of initiative. Those things are highly valued here.

There are certainly many companies, including companies in aviation and aviation engineering, where following the rules and doing it exactly the way it’s always been done is of the highest importance. We don’t have that luxury. We have to figure it out.

So we’re looking for people who are not afraid to figure it out, people who will come into an interview and not be afraid to describe situations where they had to learn something, maybe failed a few times, and then figured it out and delivered something valuable for themselves and for an employer.

We look for people who are not going to be afraid to do something a little differently, to try to solve a problem in a way that is different from how it has been solved before, while still being informed by prior research.

We do a lot of reading, actually. We were just down the hall looking at documents and academic papers. Because I serve on committees, I often bring those types of papers to the team. I’ve co-authored papers with NASA and with Oklahoma State University, one of our partners. So we bring that to the table when we’re evaluating how to solve a problem. Those are the types of things we interview for.

Joe Reed:
That’s really interesting. When we talk about leadership style, how do you personally, and how does the senior leadership team, invest in the growth of someone who is at the start of their journey, or someone who is mid-level and maybe on their third or fourth venture?

Kraettli Epperson:
Absolutely. I’ll talk a little bit about my management style and then about how we develop leadership.

My management style is sort of classic entrepreneur. It has all of those elements of looking for the next big thing. I have a very short attention span sometimes. I want to get things done really fast, and I’m continuously impatient. I’ve got all of those characteristics, and my whole career has been spent learning how to temper those and turn them into something useful. I am eager to get things done.

So I employ people who are very good at turning my harebrained schemes into project plans that can actually be executed. Every entrepreneur who sits on the visionary side of the divide and is focused on making the next big thing happen has to have people around them who can turn that into a practical plan, put it on a real and realistic timeline, and then get it done over time. They also have to make sure we’re all communicating clearly about what we’re getting done, when, where the slowdowns are, and how we might work as a team to overcome those.

That’s my leadership style. I’m very much interested in the next thing, in keeping us focused on the cutting edge, and in learning about new sensors as they become available. Lots of new sensor technology is coming along right now, which makes it an incredibly exciting place to be in the industry, to be the user and commercial consumer of those sensors at the practical end of that pipeline. That drives a lot of it for me.

In terms of how we develop leaders, there are a couple of things we do. We try to give people as much responsibility as they can handle. We’re very thoughtful and active about that. We give people projects that are designed to help them learn how to do new things and take on new responsibilities, including things like quality control testing, continuous integration work across all of our software, understanding the full stack, and cross-training into areas of the stack they may not have been familiar with before.

On the technical side, we’re doing that actively all the time. Then we see people progress. They learn new things, demonstrate leadership, and show their ability to look for quality and demand quality. That’s really important in our business, not accepting anything less than what you think is right.

In non-technical leadership, a lot of it is about communication, the ability to rapidly take what we’ve delivered and turn it into something that can be communicated to partners and customers. That’s a lot of what we develop in non-technical staff.

Joe Reed:
If we were to spotlight the next three to six months, are there any skill sets in particular, or specific types of roles or engineers, that you’re looking to attract?

Kraettli Epperson:
A few specific skills come to mind. All of our work is basically Java-based. We use Spring Boot, for example, and some other technologies. We use something called Cesium, which is a great aerospace mapping framework and is very widely used in the aviation industry.

Engineers with experience, skills, or interest in those things would be the types of software engineers we would be hiring.

More generally, software engineers who can read a technical spec and understand what that means are very valuable. People who have cross-training in software and hardware integration, sensor integration, and data analysis as a secondary skill to software development are especially useful. On our engineering team now, we’re finding that people who are interested in developing those data analysis skills, to inform the way they write software, are incredibly valuable.

Joe Reed:
And what about specific roles over the next few months?

Kraettli Epperson:
Yes, absolutely. We are likely to be expanding our software development team, so it’s around the skills I just described.

Because we’re growing, we’re also likely to be hiring additional business development professionals. We are expanding more into the commercial market now because there is more appetite for these technologies than there was a few years ago. It used to be mostly federal and mostly military.

You can look at companies like Google, Amazon, Zipline, Matternet, and others that have done small drone development, and now that activity is expanding beyond those big companies to many others that are interested in using drones for a wide variety of purposes.

We’re moving more into that commercial market. There is also continued investment in large drones and advanced air mobility, things like air taxis and autonomous cargo aircraft. That market is also expanding. So business development professionals who are interested in or have exposure to those industries would be potential hires for this company.

Joe Reed:
Well, thank you for sharing that with the audience today. They heard it here first. I’m not too sure when this will get released, probably in a couple of weeks, but they should definitely keep a lookout for your company.

Thank you for your time today. It’s really interesting to learn more about the company. It would be lovely to have you back on, maybe when there are some more developments or something you’d really like to focus on.

Kraettli Epperson:
That sounds perfect. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I really appreciated all of the in-depth questions.

Joe Reed:
Yeah, thank you.