Team

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.

Jesse Nuese is Co-Founder of the New York National Security Forum and Director of Ecosystem Development at 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.

He 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.

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