Mukund Kunapareddy | For Smack Technologies
Now you need someone to tell the world.
A pitch from Mukund Kunapareddy for the role that doesn't exist yet.
The Situation
Smack is building the first frontier AI lab for national security. MARSOC-veteran founders. Deep RL that actually works for battlefield decisions. The product is real. The funding is real. The brand? Invisible.
Marc Andreessen wrote that "software is eating the world." Defense was always next — and the companies that understood brand as strategy got there first.
Anduril's $60B+ valuation was built on technology and narrative in equal measure. Smack has the technology. The narrative is wide open.
Who I Am
San Jose State. MIS major. Not an engineer, and that's the point. I understand why great technology fails without the right narrative, the right visibility, the right people hearing about it at the right time.
I can't build your RL models. What I can do is make sure the right people know Smack exists: the journalists, the COCOM commanders, the engineers you want to recruit. Every hour your founders spend writing LinkedIn posts or booking conference booths is an hour they're not building the product. I take that off their plate.
Relationship intelligence that lives in your text messages. You text it about people you meet, and it quietly builds a data moat: enriching profiles from your calendar, email, and conversations over time. Every interaction compounds. The more you use it, the harder it is to leave. That compounding advantage is the same playbook I'd bring to Smack's brand. Every piece of content, every conference contact, every journalist relationship compounds into something a competitor can't replicate.
I've talked to YC-backed manufacturing companies and studied how industries with long sales cycles and tight-knit buyer communities build trust. I know how important platforms like X are for establishing credibility in spaces where reputation is everything. Defense is the same game, and Smack isn't playing it yet.
The Plan
Here is exactly what I would do.
Weeks 1 – 4
Every meeting, contract, pitch deck, product doc. Learn the tech well enough to explain it to a journalist.
Catalog all content, messaging, and presence. Map every gap between where Smack is and where it should be.
LinkedIn 3x/week, X daily, blog 2x/month. Content calendar built from day one.
Database of key defense journalists (Defense One, Breaking Defense, War on the Rocks, C4ISRNet), podcast hosts, and conference organizers.
Prioritize all 2026 defense conferences. Lock early-bird rates for top 3. Map which decision-makers attend which events.
Weeks 5 – 8
Ghost-write 2 thought leadership pieces. Launch company newsletter. "Why We Build" founder story series.
Target 1,000 LinkedIn and 500 X followers by end of week 8. Consistent posting, community engagement, organic and engaged audiences.
Full logistics for first major conference: booth, materials, pre-scheduled meetings, demo flow, post-event follow-up system.
"Day in the Life at Smack" series for cleared engineers. LinkedIn, Hacker News, defense job boards. Culture as recruiting weapon.
Pitch to 3-5 defense tech journalists at Defense One, Breaking Defense, and War on the Rocks. Set up founder interviews and podcast appearances. Coordinate bylines, prep talking points, and handle all follow-up. Build real relationships with journalists so Smack becomes their go-to source when they write about AI in defense.
Weeks 9 – 12
What drives engagement? What generates leads? Let data kill assumptions.
Playbooks for social cadence, conference ops, media relations. Make the role scalable for the next hire.
Monthly defense AI newsletter: curated insights, original analysis, product updates. Smack stays top-of-mind.
Set up and manage a CRM for DoD contacts, journalists, and partners. I've researched CRM workflows in legacy industries and know how to build a pipeline where no relationship falls through the cracks.
Hard data to founders: follower growth, engagement, media placements, conference ROI, inbound leads. Prove it worked.
Conference Calendar
Where contracts get signed and reputations are built. Someone needs to own the logistics, the follow-ups, and the booth.
AUSA Global Force
March 2026, Huntsville, AL
Army's premier force modernization symposium. 7,000+ military leaders and defense execs.
Sea-Air-Space
April 2026, National Harbor, MD
Navy League's flagship expo. 15,000+ attendees. Critical for multi-domain positioning.
SOF Week
May 2026, Tampa, FL
USSOCOM's premier industry week. Founders' MARSOC backgrounds make this home turf. Non-negotiable.
TechNet Cyber
June 2026, Baltimore, MD
AFCEA's premier cyber event. CYBERCOM, NSA, and DISA decision-makers.
AUSA Annual Meeting
October 2026, Washington, DC
The Super Bowl of defense. 44,000+ attendees, every major contractor. No booth = invisible.
Defense One Summit
November 2026, Washington, DC
Intimate, high-signal gathering. Perfect for founder speaking slots.
Reagan Defense Forum
December 2026, Simi Valley, CA
Elite, invite-only. Congressional leaders, four-stars, defense CEOs.
7 Events. 12 Months.
Pre-event outreach, logistics, booth prep, on-site support, 24-hour follow-ups. A full-time job nobody currently owns.
Brand Intelligence
These companies invest heavily in cultural identity. It's how they attract talent and get DoD to pick up the phone.
Consumer tech branding applied to defense. Tolkien-inspired naming. Defense made aspirational for talent who'd never consider Lockheed. Every Palmer podcast appearance doubles as a recruiting pitch.
What Smack Can Learn
You can win contracts with consumer-tech branding. But Anduril's SV aesthetic can rub traditional military buyers the wrong way, and Smack's warfighter-founded story is something they'll never replicate.
Technical credibility first. V-BAT and Hivemind demos are the marketing. Pilot testimonials, deployment metrics, technical deep-dives that pull in engineers hungry for meaningful work.
What Smack Can Learn
Smack's deep RL approach is genuinely novel. Accessible explainers on why it beats fine-tuned LLMs for battlefield decisions would make Smack the company researchers actually want to cite.
Deliberate mystique meets conviction. Karp's framing of technology as civilization's defense makes employees feel part of something bigger. Brand devotion is almost religious.
What Smack Can Learn
Cultural identity is a moat. Smack's version is more authentic than any of them: actual combat veterans building AI for the next generation of warfighters. The story is already there. It just needs someone telling it.
Smack's Brand Whitespace
The Unfair Advantage
Anduril has Palmer. Palantir has Karp. Shield AI has deployment footage. Smack has something none of them can replicate: founders who've been in the fight. Two MARSOC veterans who've operated in the environments their AI is built for.
Add Dan Gould scaling Tinder from $0 to $1B, and you bridge "we understand the warfighter" with "we can build at scale." No one else has both.
The Proposed Brand Position
The Ask
Give me two weeks.
No title, no long-term commitment. Just two weeks to show you what dedicated brand and comms work looks like for Smack. Smack has the product, the funding, and the mission. The only thing missing is someone making sure the right people know about it. Let me prove I'm that person.