CWRU entrepreneur John Dulin on startup lessons and growing a business

John Dulin

John Dulin (CWR ‘15) is the CEO and founder of Modern Intelligence, a Texas-based defense startup developing an autonomous targeting platform. Their first product, CUTLASS, uses cutting edge proprietary AI and ML algorithms to identify and track a variety of types of potential threats on the battlefield.

What was the original inspiration for you to start Modern Intelligence?

I’ve always been fascinated by history, especially military history, and had a lot of friends and family in the military when I was growing up.

I also noticed that many of the greatest technological breakthroughs have come from national security related programs. A huge portion of modern technology came from Cold War and Apollo R&D programs.

After graduating CWRU with a physics degree, I worked on a variety of machine learning applications, but as an American who wants our service members to be safe and our tax dollars to be spent more efficiently, I was always interested in defense technology. Furthermore, as a technologist, I thought that the application of machine learning and AI to defense posed one of the hardest problems out there.

What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced in growing Modern Intelligence to where it is today?

There are very few defense businesses where the technical challenges are greater than the business challenges. 

For us, crossing the “Valley of Death” has been very difficult. This is the period a defense company goes through in between winning their first few small R&D pilot contracts and winning their first large volume contract. Crossing the valley is very difficult—you need to find people in the armed forces with the ability and resources to purchase new products, then you need to find the right use case for your product, and then you need to align the two. 

The complexity of the DoD purchasing system means that there is a large gap in between your customer and user. It’s very difficult to bridge this, and we learned very quickly that one of the keys to succeeding is creating an efficient sales process to prevent wasted time and resources.

What’s the biggest challenge you expect to face in the next 10 years?

Challenge number 1 is getting our product fully operational. We will be testing our software in a real-world scenario soon and collecting feedback on our performance. This is a huge milestone in ensuring Cutlass significantly improves how quickly, effectively, and efficiently operators can find the threats they’re looking for. 

Challenge number 2 is showing that our platform can perform well in a variety of applications. Our proofs of concept have demonstrated automated targeting with satellite imagery, but it’s our end goal to be deployable across drones, boats, planes, and more. We’ve been working hard to expand our API and make our system more reliable and general so that we can offer an API trial to any defense company or government body interested in automated targeting.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from your entrepreneurial journey so far?

When I was a student and heard founders talk about how hard it was to build a startup, I thought they were just trying to be humble, but I’ve realized that their advice was entirely true. It is way harder than you can possibly imagine to build a successful startup. However, if you accept that and still decide you want to do it, the way to succeed is to learn as quickly as possible the difference between actually trying and just being persistent. Most school and work experience just teaches you to be persistent, to repeatedly work at a problem in a certain manner. This is certainly work, but it’s different from truly trying. When building a startup, you have to try with all of your will, remove all excuses, and try every method available to you to move forward.

 

Modern Intelligence is one of the CWRU-founded ventures in the CWRU Alumni Venture Fund portfolio.