Senior technologist Jake Huffman grew up in a North Carolina county with one stoplight, got rejected from architecture school, and fell into engineering because someone told him he wasn't an artist. A sophomore materials science class changed his direction. A steel plant nearly scared him out of metallurgy. A Coast Guard repair center gave him helicopter parts to build with no experience. And a graduate school math problem introduced him to writing code. Every turn came from the same instinct: go one level deeper than the job asks you to.

In this episode, Jake talks about why boring systems fall apart, what overconfidence looks like from the inside, and the moment he realized it was more important for his team to function well than for him to be right.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
01:01 One Stoplight, One Wrestling Team
02:50 Rejected by Art School
06:42 White Hot Steel and Walking Away
08:11 Building Helicopter Parts for the Coast Guard
11:03 Craft Over Mission
15:04 When Systems Don't Fit in One Head
18:34 The Blind Spots of Big-Picture Thinking
24:44 Team Function Over Being Right
27:41 Scar Tissue
30:16 Learn the Old Stuff First
32:58 Build Your Own RAG
34:44 What AI Should Scare You About
36:40 Wrap Up

Thank you for spending time with us today! If you're energized by the conversation and eager to see how bold ideas translate into real‑world mission advantage, explore the Bcore ecosystem. At Bcore, we're uniting exceptional people and cutting‑edge technology to accelerate mission impact and advance national security.

Learn more, connect with our team, and discover opportunities to collaborate at bcore.com. Join us in pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Troy Scoran is a technologist at B/CORE who built his career by raising his hand before anyone asked. He grew up in a western Pennsylvania town of two thousand people and three stoplights, got recruited off LinkedIn, and moved to Tysons Corner to join a fifteen-person startup with one condition: don't box me in.

Chad and Zil brought Troy on to talk about what it looks like to build a career through initiative. The conversation went somewhere honest. Troy described how saying yes to everything at a small company gave him a view of the entire business that most people his age never get. Now he's figuring out where to go deep and who to bring with him.

The three of them land on something worth hearing: the people who raise their hand early are the ones who get to choose what they become later.

This episode is for anyone who has been the youngest person in the room and earned their seat by showing up. For practitioners building range and wondering when to specialize. And for anyone mid-career who is shifting from learning everything to leading others through it.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome from the Plane

00:44 Peruvian Chicken and First Impressions

01:16 How Troy and Zil Connected

04:12 Three Stoplights and Sixty Graduates

05:58 Saying Yes to the Move

06:58 Corner Apartment in Tysons

08:13 Sports, Coaching, and Strategy

12:37 Keep Me in Pennsylvania

14:17 Imposter Syndrome as Butterflies

15:52 Taking Production Down Overnight

17:35 You're Already on the Team

19:48 The Trade-Offs of Range

21:57 JSON Meets SQL

22:55 Full Stack Mentality

24:53 From Taker to Multiplier

Thank you for spending time with us today! If you're energized by the conversation and eager to see how bold ideas translate into real‑world mission advantage, explore the Bcore ecosystem. At Bcore, we're uniting exceptional people and cutting‑edge technology to accelerate mission impact and advance national security.

Learn more, connect with our team, and discover opportunities to collaborate at bcore.com. Join us in pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Sarika Lamont is the Chief People Officer at a B2B technology company and a former GovCon talent leader. She built an integrated talent management framework from scratch, pitched it to two different CEOs, and now leads AI transformation from the people side of the house.

Chad and Zil brought Sarika on to talk about what happens when organizations refuse to change how they develop people. The conversation went deeper than expected. Zil described what it feels like to outgrow your leadership. Sarika explained why counter-offers only buy you six months.

The three of them land on something worth hearing: AI did not create the gap between how we manage people and how people actually grow. AI made that gap impossible to ignore.

This episode is for anyone who has sat through a performance review that had nothing to do with their actual performance. For leaders who know they need to get closer to the work but don't know how. And for engineers wondering whether the old career ladder still leads anywhere.

00:00 Welcome and Setup
01:21 Sarika's Path Into People
03:32 HR's Identity Crisis
06:15 The GovCon Talent Gap
08:30 Leaner Teams, More Pressure
13:27 Retention Is Not a Compensation Problem
17:17 Career Ladders That Slow People Down
19:42 Burning It to the Ground
21:28 AI Makes Feedback More Human
26:06 Leaders Who Won't Get Their Hands Dirty
28:59 The Engineering Skills Shift
31:21 Building Close to Value
33:05 Tossing the Old Playbook
33:59 From Tool Adoption to Mindset Shift
35:33 Tiger Teams and the Right Personas
37:18 Prompting Variability
38:48 Getting People Off the Sideline
41:58 Focus Fridays and the AI Council
44:11 The Great Equalizer
47:14 Accountability When Everyone Has Access
53:00 Sunday Scaries and What Drives People to Stay
57:21 Good People Want to Work With Good People

Thank you for spending time with us today! If you're energized by the conversation and eager to see how bold ideas translate into real‑world mission advantage, explore the Bcore ecosystem. At Bcore, we're uniting exceptional people and cutting‑edge technology to accelerate mission impact and advance national security.

Learn more, connect with our team, and discover opportunities to collaborate at bcore.com. Join us in pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Courtney Kelly is the Chief Strategy Officer at C Speed. She grew up in a small Massachusetts town, trained in ballet for 15 years, studied history, and planned on law school. When that path closed, she landed in aerospace and defense consulting doing competitive intelligence and price-to-win work. From there she moved into Raytheon's strategy group and later KPMG, where she built a core philosophy: strategy only matters if you execute against it. In this episode, Courtney unpacks how she navigates ambiguity as a Type A introvert, why performative leadership falls flat, and what it feels like being the junior person in the room during M&A integrations. The conversation connects strategy to mission outcomes, breaks down integration tradeoffs, and gets honest about boundary-setting in an always-on culture.

00:00 Meet Courtney Kelly
01:47 Early Life and Ballet
02:33 The Accidental Strategist
04:46 Consulting in Defense
07:32 Strategy Meets Execution
09:50 Type A in Ambiguity
14:02 Mission Focus in Delivery
17:09 M&A Battle Scars
18:44 Why Companies Do M&A
23:33 Work-Life Balance Reality
30:23 Introvert Leadership
32:59 Reading the Room
34:30 The Ambiguity Muscle
37:21 No Playbook
40:18 Closing

Thank you for spending time with us today! If you're energized by the conversation and eager to see how bold ideas translate into real‑world mission advantage, explore the Bcore ecosystem. At Bcore, we're uniting exceptional people and cutting‑edge technology to accelerate mission impact and advance national security.

Learn more, connect with our team, and discover opportunities to collaborate at bcore.com. Join us in pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Adam Chin is a cloud and software engineer who calls himself a "chaos domino pusher" and a "safe extrovert," someone energized in trusted spaces but drained when masking. He traces how moving often as a kid built his ability to connect quickly, read rooms, and use shared context to build relationships. That same approach led to meeting his wife at a concert.

Adam credits early mentors for showing him what approachable, context-rich leadership looks like. He explains how curiosity, ego-free collaboration, and explaining the "why" shaped his professional growth. He also shares how he manages "swirl" when goals are unclear through rubber-ducking, writing down obstacles, and maintaining what he calls the "Adam backlog."

The episode closes on AI adoption. Adam argues technologists need skepticism, stronger validation habits, and curiosity about how systems work. He worries about losing the human context once found in places like Stack Overflow and forums and makes the case for preserving community as AI tools accelerate.

Thank you for spending time with us today! If you're energized by the conversation and eager to see how bold ideas translate into real‑world mission advantage, explore the Bcore ecosystem. At Bcore, we're uniting exceptional people and cutting‑edge technology to accelerate mission impact and advance national security.

Learn more, connect with our team, and discover opportunities to collaborate at bcore.com. Join us in pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Sue Gordon served as Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence and spent a long career at the CIA, rising to senior positions across all four Agency directorates.

In this conversation, Sue shares the framework that guided her through an unconventional career path. She started as a zoology major doing Soviet missile analysis. She was moved off prestigious assignments she loved. Each setback became the transportation to her next success.

Her approach is simple: nose down, head up. Master your current job while staying aware of the bigger mission your work serves. When setbacks hit, let go of who you were so you can become something you never could have been.

Sue also addresses the challenges facing new talent entering the workforce today. She argues that context and vision matter more than ever. Organizations have less time to develop leaders, and the world presents so many crises that none feels big enough to rally around. Her advice: find a purpose, commit to it, and learn to make decisions before certainty arrives.

This episode delivers a personal and practical look at career resilience from someone who navigated decades of transformation in national security.

Timestamps
00:00 Introduction and Welcome

00:20 Setting the Stage for Sue's Story

02:23 Starting as a Zoologist at CIA

05:24 Learning on the Job and Advancing Knowledge

08:30 The Nose Down, Head Up Framework

12:47 Overcoming Perceptions and Proving Value

18:47 Four Major Setbacks That Shaped Sue's Career

25:45 Letting Go of Who You Were

27:00 Navigating Vulnerability and Finding Support

28:12 Accepting Hard Truths and Moving Forward

30:44 Asking What You Want from This Moment

34:23 Vision, Purpose, and Decision Making for New Talent

38:47 The Second Lieutenant Moment

41:07 Leadership in a Modern Workforce

44:39 Why Context Is the Missing Piece

50:01 Why This Is the Moment to Be Part Of

Thank you for spending time with us today! If you're energized by the conversation and eager to see how bold ideas translate into real‑world mission advantage, explore the Bcore ecosystem. At Bcore, we're uniting exceptional people and cutting‑edge technology to accelerate mission impact and advance national security.

Learn more, connect with our team, and discover opportunities to collaborate at bcore.com. Join us in pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

In this episode, Chad Kim and Zil Vyas kick off the second season of their podcast with a discussion on the importance of human connections, staying curious, and learning from each other in a rapidly changing tech landscape. They reflect on the challenges and growth from their first season and share their personal goals for 2026. Topics include the importance of humility, the balance between work and personal life, building relationships, and the evolving roles within their tech company. The episode promises a line-up of diverse and interesting guests, each contributing unique experiences and insights.

Thank you for spending time with us today! If you're energized by the conversation and eager to see how bold ideas translate into real‑world mission advantage, explore the Bcore ecosystem. At Bcore, we're uniting exceptional people and cutting‑edge technology to accelerate mission impact and advance national security.

Learn more, connect with our team, and discover opportunities to collaborate at bcore.com. Join us in pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Episode Description

In this season one finale, I sit down with Lee Garber, our General Partner at NewSpring Capital, to get under the hood of calculated bets and strategic decision-making. Lee takes us through his fascinating journey from being "the guy behind the guy" - starting as a newspaper-selling kid who became his fraternity treasurer - to becoming a seasoned private equity professional making million-dollar decisions.

We dive deep into the evolution of a PE career, from analyst to partner, and how the role transforms from connecting dots to making complex risk assessments. Lee shares raw insights about their biggest mistakes, including a telecom deal that went sideways, and how they turned it around through sheer perseverance. He breaks down the difference between perceived and real risk, the art of knowing when to pull the plug on deals, and why their Monday investment committee meetings can get pretty heated - but in the best way possible.

What struck me most was Lee's philosophy: "Act like it's yours, and maybe one day it will be." This episode reveals the human side of high-stakes investing, the importance of running toward problems rather than away from them and why being present - both professionally and personally - might be the most valuable skill of all.

Thank you for spending time with us today! If you're energized by the conversation and eager to see how bold ideas translate into real‑world mission advantage, explore the Bcore ecosystem. At Bcore, we're uniting exceptional people and cutting‑edge technology to accelerate mission impact and advance national security.

Learn more, connect with our team, and discover opportunities to collaborate at bcore.com. Join us in pushing the boundaries of what's possible.