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Andy Markoff
Andy Markoff is the co-founder and CEO of Smack Technologies, an El Segundo defense startup he calls the first frontier AI lab built for national security. A former Marine Raider who served as an operations officer during the Battle of Mosul and later worked on Palantir's strategy team, Markoff is building AI products - Omega for the command center and Alpha for the edge - aimed at compressing military planning from days into minutes. In March 2026 the company announced $32 million in combined Seed and Series A funding led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, behind a thesis Markoff sums up bluntly: 'Decision Dominance will be the deciding factor in preventing WWIII because it's the only goal achievable before 2027.'
Caitlin Doornbos
Caitlin Doornbos is a Washington D.C.-based political journalist and war correspondent for the New York Post, specializing in national security, foreign policy, and military affairs. A Kansas native, she built her career from local crime reporting to embedded battlefield dispatches in Ukraine, earning the Marie Colvin Award for Foreign Correspondence in 2025. She previously served as Stars and Stripes' Pentagon reporter and Indo-Pacific correspondent based at Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan, and was part of the Orlando Sentinel team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting.