Epsilon3

Give people a goal that feels unattainable and they won't push harder. They'll just quietly accept it won't happen. I consciously try setting targets at 90% of what I think is possible. Not 100. Not stretch-to-the-point-of-absurdity. Just far enough that people feel the pull, close enough that they actually believe it. The goals that drove the best work I've been part of were never comfortable, but they were never unbelievable either. The philosophy at SpaceX was built around exactly that, and those were the targets where the work was consistently at its best. When a goal feels within reach but not within comfort, people work toward it differently. Miss the goal by ten days on a target that felt impossible? That's still progress you wouldn't have made otherwise. Hit a comfortable target exactly on time? You probably left something on the table. But a key piece that holds it all together is the milestones in between. A big goal without intermediate markers is just pressure without direction. When people can see that hitting this week's milestone puts them on track for the bigger one, the whole thing becomes real. We think about this constantly at Epsilon3. Getting the goal right is core to our culture, and it makes a real difference in how the team moves together. How does your team think about goal setting?

Most enterprise software companies talk about being customer-focused. We ship improvements while you're still on Slack. Our team has sat in mission control. We've been on console when something breaks. We know what "this is blocking us" actually means when the work is mission-critical — and we build accordingly. Frequent releases, fast fixes, and customer-informed from the ground up. At Epsilon3, we build enterprise software for complex operations — by people who've done the work, for the next generation of operators, builders, and maintainers working on technology from the deepest depths of the ocean to low Earth orbit and beyond.

When we started Epsilon3, I was set on serving aerospace. I'd spent nearly 20 years in the industry. It was what I knew, what I loved, and honestly the only world I'd really operated in. The first hint that things might go differently came from paying attention to where people I'd worked with had ended up. Former colleagues from Northrop and SpaceX had moved into energy, nuclear, aviation. And when I started talking to people in those industries, I kept finding the same thing. The problems felt extremely familiar: the stakes were high, and the operational complexity rhymed with everything we were already building for. So we started having conversations outside of aerospace, and what resonated in those rooms wasn't what I expected - the space background was never really what the conversation centered on. It was the experience of being at a company before it had figured itself out. Where processes didn't exist yet, where you had to do 25 different jobs in a week, and were building the aircraft on the way down after being thrown out of the helicopter with all the parts. That kind of improvisation, the experience of having to figure things out before the answers existed travels in a way that domain expertise alone doesn't. If I had spent 20 years at a large defense contractor and walked into those rooms, I think I would have been written off. That environment builds deep expertise in a process that already exists. I also think about this a lot when we talk about hiring at Epsilon3. The environment someone came from tends to tell you more about how they'll show up than the industry they worked in.

Beyond “Old vs. New”: The Future of the Defense Industrial Base Is Scalable Execution Excited to share our Co-Founder and COO Max Mednik's thoughts about the current state of defense modernization in his piece for RealClearDefense. Max asserts that leading defense collaboration won’t succeed or fail on the basis of innovation. Execution, giving startups and legacy primes alike the shared “ability to execute complex procedures with precision, at scale, over time”, will instead be what leads to decisive advantage for the warfighter. Read Max’s full piece here: https://lnkd.in/eCQVKk6P

Epsilon3 Changelog #96 is live, and it's a big one. Now available in the Epsilon3 platform: ✔️ Role Based Permissions ✔️ Require Skills for Roles ✔️ Human Resources ✔️ Issues Insights ✔️ Dynamic Item Detail Update More control, better visibility, and smarter inventory tracking. See what's new: https://lnkd.in/eyZ6ASUH

When I started at Northrop Grumman in 2004, I was programming in Fortran 90/95. They’d recently upgraded to it. Fortran 77 was developed in 1977, and that’s what I learned as a freshman in college. I remember sitting in that class thinking, “Why am I learning this? I want to learn about aerodynamics and lift and drag, not a programming language from the ’70s.” Everyone thinks aerospace is cutting edge. The rockets, the satellites, the technology pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. And in some ways, it is. But sometimes the tech underneath it is decades old. In my freshman year, we were required to learn that seemingly “outdated” language. At the time, it felt completely disconnected from what I wanted to do. Years later, I found myself in England, working on a spacecraft program, using that exact language. And it wasn’t just Fortran. I learned MATLAB in college too, and that ended up being even more valuable. I was once working with a colleague investigating a spacecraft anomaly. We had a dataset with 100,000 to 200,000 data points. He was trying to analyze it in Excel, but Excel had a 65,000-row limit at the time. He was stuck looking at fragments of high-rate data, trying to piece together what went wrong. I suggested we try MATLAB instead. We uploaded the entire dataset and ran the analysis. Within 30 minutes, we had the full picture and that analysis helped us figure out what went wrong with the spacecraft. All because of classes I didn’t think I’d ever use. The things you’re learning now - the classes that seem pointless, the skills that feel disconnected from what you want to do, they’re building blocks. Not everything will map 1:1 to your career. But you can’t read without knowing the alphabet first. The foundation you’re building now is what you’ll rely on later, even when you can’t see how it connects yet. Has this ever happened to you? Something you learned years ago that ended up mattering way more than you expected?

The nuclear and fusion industries are at an inflection point, and the pressures facing these industries today share many similarities to what the aerospace sector faced a decade ago. In a new op-ed for POWER magazine, Epsilon3 CEO and Co-Founder Laura Crabtree draws on her decade in the aerospace industry to lay out what nuclear and fusion operators can learn from aerospace's hard-won experience building operational foundations that scale under pressure. Read Laura's full piece here: https://lnkd.in/dGWYbE49

Congratulations to the Firefly Aerospace team on the successful launch of Alpha Flight 7, a hard-earned mission success that validates the disciplined, methodical work their team has put in over the past year. 🚀 All of us at Epsilon3 are proud to partner with you as you help set the standard for the next generation of space flight. Onward to Block II. 👏

CMMC 2.0. NIST 800-171. FedRAMP. If you've new to public sector compliance, nodding along while quietly wondering whether these are basically the same thing — you're not alone. They're not. And confusing them can cost you a contract. Our latest blog breaks down exactly how these three frameworks differ, where they overlap, and what defense contractors and federal software vendors actually need to know before pursuing certification. Read it on the Epsilon3 blog 👇 https://lnkd.in/g7_Y9JcY

Excited to announce our Co-Founder and CEO, Laura Crabtree, has been named to Inc. Magazine's 2026 Female Founders 500! Inc.’s Female Founders 500 list evaluates leaders based on their impact, revenue, and innovation within the past year. In their words, the achievement recognizes female leaders whose “bold ideas, resilience, and execution are shaping the future of their industries.”  Here at Epsilon3, we can’t think of anyone who embodies this better than Laura. We started in aerospace, with 30% of the teams behind US orbital launches running on Epsilon3. Today, we power operations for our partners across high-stakes industries like aviation, industrial manufacturing, nuclear energy, and more. None of that would be possible without Laura’s vision and guidance — congratulations!  More on the news here: https://lnkd.in/dhEszq6x See the full #FemaleFounders500 list here: https://lnkd.in/d_2CzDy