Episode Details

Overview

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.

For More:

* Integrate: integrate.co

* John Conafay on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/conafay