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Over a 20-year career in the U.S. Navy, Pete served as a Surface Warfare Officer, including tours at Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), OPNAV N96 (Surface Warfare Programs) and National War College, culminating in command of USS Pearl Harbor (LSD 52). He was responsible for deployment readiness, logistics, and mission execution across the Indo-Pacific. He managed people, equipment, and sustainment in environments where the margin for error is very small.

More recently, he served as the Private Capital and Startup Engagement Officer for Task Force Hopper, the Navy effort focused on AI, autonomy, and software across the Surface Warfare Enterprise. In that role he worked directly with founders, investors, and program offices. He understands how the government buys technology and how young companies can actually scale.

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Over the past decade, Drew has led efforts for early-stage dual-use startups and venture firms to navigate the federal funding landscape, including building the I2A program, which achieved over $1 billion in government contracts, $500 million in venture investment, and $125 million in commercial contracts within its first year.

Drew is an original founding member of several government innovation organizations to include SpaceWERX and SSC Front Door, and has served as a Defense Ventures Fellow. He holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and an MSIRE from Florida International University.

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Over the past decade, Jay has worked the capital side of early-stage technology and built the rooms where founders, investors, and buyers meet. He founded SoCal Deep Tech Week, now three editions in and held in Long Beach in 2026 with the city as a strategic partner, and the New York National Security Forum, two days in Manhattan split between how the government actually buys and how a defense company gets financed. Both are curated convenings run under the Chatham House Rule; the Forum holds roughly 150 people a day.

Previously Director & Head of Platform at AeroX Ventures, Jay worked with seed and Series A aerospace and defense companies on partnerships and government access. At a SoCal nonprofit organization, he helped early-stage companies raise roughly $100 million and built relationships with more than 200 investors and institutional allocators. He has authored papers for the International Astronautical Congress on AI, telerobotics, and VR/AR applications in space exploration and austere-environment medical care. He holds a B.A. in business administration with a focus in business analytics from California State University, Fullerton.

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Jesse Nuese is Co-Founder of the New York National Security Forum and a board member of the Sparrow Point Foundation. He is also Managing Partner, Research & Technology at Palisade Bergschrund, a cross-border defense technology research and advisory firm working across New York, London, Brussels, and Kyiv.

He served in the U.S. Army as an infantryman and paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, including a 2014 combat deployment to Afghanistan. After the Army he worked at the Defense Innovation Unit, Recorded Future, and Boeing Defense, Space & Security, and co-founded Forward Horizon Group before its roll-up into PalBerg.

Jesse is a doctoral researcher in Defence Studies at King’s College London. His dissertation, Innovation Under Fire, looks at how defense innovation actually happens under wartime conditions, from the workshop to the front line. He holds a BA from Columbia, a Master of International Business from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and an MS in Cybersecurity Risk and Strategy from NYU. He is an alumnus of the Warrior-Scholar Project, completed the Cambridge Security Initiative’s International Security and Intelligence Programme, and studied Mandarin at Peking University as a Gilman Scholar. Born in Montana and raised in Wisconsin, he splits his time between New York, London, and Kyiv.

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Saptarsi previously worked at the NSA on high-level counterterrorism matters, deploying overseas twice and embedding with government partners, before leading innovation efforts in New York at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). Throughout his tenure at DIU, he cultivated a deep understanding of the defense technology ecosystem across the United States and allied nations. He actively engaged with and assessed startup technologies to find alignment with government technology priorities.

He now advises several startups on matters ranging from business strategy to government and private capital engagements while building his own investment portfolio.

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