From Infantry to Intelligence: Grit, Discipline, and the Making of a Founder

AIR DATE:

February 19, 2026

LENGTH:

11:45 minutes

ADAM SOLOMON (00:51):

Jason, thanks so much for sitting down with me for Beyond the Deal, where we get to get a little more personal. And I'd love to start with your time in the Marine Corps almost a dozen years and starting out kind of as a grunt on the bottom. Would love to hear how you kind of got through that. That's not easy, getting through basic and getting deployed.

JASON PASSWATER (01:16):

Yeah, so I think it was right after high school in 1997 is when I went on active duty and I had the scores to do anything and the recruiter said, what do you want to do? And I said, well, I want to be in the infantry, that's why I'm joining the Marines. So I went in the Marines, the first duty station was over in Bahrain, that's where I met my wife. She's a Brit and she was coming through there as a stewardess and we met while she was staying there. But fast forward to 29 Palms, California. It sounds exotic, it's a lot of beach and no ocean, but it was a great experience and my wife and I had my son there and I realized that hey, I need to get a job if I'm going to get out. And I called around to some of the big cities actually, and I remember an East coast guy (my family's on the east coast) - he called Baltimore PD and it was maybe 1999, making something like 17, 18 grand a year to work the inner beat. Didn't think that was going to be my calling. I'd always taken every opportunity that was given to me for training or anything. I'd also been doing my degree as well during lunch, even on a ship, doing classes - and a lateral move, only MOS was presented to me into counterintelligence and human intelligence. So I jumped at it, and I ended up changing my job and went through the counterintelligence agents course in the Marine Corps.

ADAM SOLOMON (02:51):

And was that just luck and happenstance that that's where you're able to transfer or was there any intentionality on your part?

JASON PASSWATER (02:57):

Part? No, it was intentionality. I mean, I had really been looking for what's next for me more with an orientation towards taking care of my family more than anything. You get a lot of good skills out of the infantry, but not a lot of transferable skills sometimes that are going to pay the bills. So I really looked at what's next for me to do that, and that is something that the career counselor presented to me. So there's a big long process. You have to go through a board with the unit and then you get selected and then you eventually go through the training.

ADAM SOLOMON (03:32):

And how has your experience in the Marines, how has it influenced the type of leader you are, the type of CEO you are today at Intel 471?

JASON PASSWATER (03:42):

I think there's a lot of the obvious stuff, the soft skills that everybody could probably come up with - leadership, attention to detail, discipline, these kind of things. If I think back to a couple that really resonate with me, I'd say resourcefulness is a pretty big one. In the Marines, we always had this mentality of doing more with less. We had this real obsession with mission and nothing was going to stop us to achieve that mission. And oftentimes you felt like we were under-resourced as it was. Some of the other stuff would be, let me think here. I had a couple of these lined up - resourcefulness.

(04:26):

The other one would be the importance of just team camaraderie and culture. If you're going to build a team, if you're going to build a company, you need to get everybody aligned to a specific strategy and a vision and a mission. You have to have that culture instilled, that camaraderie and everybody on board with that. And that was really big in the Marine Corps and it's something I really enjoyed about my time in the Marine Corps as well. And the last thing would be, and I've got a number of folks maybe on one hand that I can count that regardless in the dark, would follow them pretty much anywhere, no questions asked. So I feel I've got a good idea of what a good leader looks like and they were always the humble expert, the quiet professional that just really knew their trade that really earned the respect of the folks around them and just let their work do the talking for 'em. So I try to emulate that as close as possible and try to aspire to be like that. And I think that works well as well.

ADAM SOLOMON (05:31):

Yeah, I can attest. The company has such a distinct culture that is very much the Intel 471 culture. It's not necessarily marine culture, but you can see the elements of that background, I'm sure Mark's background as well and the federal police where there's elements of that that are definitely interwoven into that very, very distinctive culture that I think is responsible for a huge amount of the company's success.

JASON PASSWATER(05:54):

Yeah, I totally agree.

ADAM SOLOMON (05:57):

So you've bootstrapped a business all while having a young family - two young kids at the time. Well lemme start again. Let's do, they've been not super young at the time.

JASON PASSWATER (06:11):

I mean, they were in middle school, high school.

ADAM SOLOMON (06:13):

Lemme start again. So you're bootstrapping a business, you've got a young family at the time. I can't imagine you had a ton of free time when you did, what did you do?

JASON PASSWATER (06:27):

Well, really, I think as we bootstrapped through to 2021, I mean everything was the business and we as a family had accepted that we kind of put all our chips in that and went for it. And I couldn't have done it without all of their support. Now we started to scale out. Now I could take some more time for payback the family for some of the sacrifice that they had made, but also take some time for myself for some hobbies. So I've waited until after the transaction to do a lot of that.

ADAM SOLOMON (07:01):

And I want to get to the hobbies, the post-transaction hobbies, as it were ,in a second. But to your point on it wasn't just you putting all your chips in as your family put all your chips in at what at the time must have been pretty

JASON PASSWATER (07:15):

Non-obvious.

ADAM SOLOMON (07:17):

How did that decision get made to say, Hey, we're going to go for it?

JASON PASSWATER (07:20):

So I distinctly remember on a walk with my wife, we had our dogs with us and we were taking 'em for a walk and we had a decision to make. I had a really good job. I was managing a global department, making a really good salary, and I had my own equity in that company. That would've resulted in a pretty good outcome and actually did for a lot of people, but we just felt it was the right opportunity. We had set ourselves up to be somewhat resilient if it didn't work out. And I felt confident in my skillset that I could hit the job market if I needed to again. And my wife really knew that it meant a lot to me and she said, you got to do this. And so together we made a decision and we went after it. And to add another component to this, we decided very, very early when my son was born in 2001 that my wife was going to stay home and take care of the kids while I did the marine thing and then eventually got back in and did the startup thing as well.

ADAM SOLOMON (08:21):

Yeah. And did you guys know at the time how all consuming founding and running a company until 471 was going to be or is that a surprise?

JASON PASSWATER (08:33):

I don't think we knew, but I don't think it was a surprise at the same time because it's kind of in our DNA, both Mark and I, to almost make it consuming to make sure that success is going to happen.

ADAM SOLOMON (08:47):

Yeah. Great. And then post-transaction hobbies. I know of at least a couple I know because she's a frequent guest appearance when you're on Zoom - your German Shepherd.

JASON PASSWATER (09:04):

Oh yeah, German Shepherd.

ADAM SOLOMON (09:05):

And I know because we went to F1 together in Miami at Thoma Bravo event, that F1 is one of your passions. We would love to hear the history of that.

JASON PASSWATER (09:17):

My wife's a Brit, so she grew up watching F1 back in the heyday, I think of Williams and some of the other teams. And then like a lot of Americans, the Netflix series actually, Mark is a huge F1 fan.

(09:30):

As we built the company, he lived in Monaco, which a lot of the F1 folks live in Monaco and he's been a huge F1 fan. So he originally got me into it or at least got me somewhat interested. And then like a lot of other people, I watched the Netflix series and got really interested. So my wife and I, I've always liked cars. I worked on cars when I was a kid, dabbled in that a bit more like muscle cars and stuff. But I now had the ability to get more active in that space and one of the big perks for being a Thoma Bravo company is that you get those tickets to the Miami F1 every year. That's right.

ADAM SOLOMON (10:07):

It's pretty sweet.

JASON PASSWATER (10:08):

I'm one of the ones that gets with you earlier to line up.

ADAM SOLOMON (10:11):

Some tickets. You are very diligent about sending me an email early. Can I get two tickets?

JASON PASSWATER (10:15):

My wife is also very appreciative of those tickets.

ADAM SOLOMON (10:21):

You, do you have a team or driver?

JASON PASSWATER (10:24):

My team would be Aston Martin as Martin for sure. But driver wise right now, PTRI. Okay. I mean I love just Ptri. Again, going back to the cultural expectations, we have humble expert, choir professional, there we go.

ADAM SOLOMON (10:45):

I love it. And what's funny about going to the Thoma Bravo event is most of us there are kind of casually watching the race, having some food, having some drinks, whatever - and you and your wife are having the headphones on so you can listen to the radio chatter, listen to the race. We're sitting right in a corner. It was actually a good race this year too.

JASON PASSWATER (11:03):

It was very good. I mean we're into it. We're there Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We're watching not just the F1, we're watching the race, the quals, the practice. We're also watching the Porsche Career Cup, so it is a good weekend. It's we're very appreciative of that.

ADAM SOLOMON (11:21):

One more question for me, if you'd be so kind, what do you think is the most underrated skill for A CEO?

JASON PASSWATER (11:27):

Good question. I've harped on this a bit through this and our previous conversation. I really think that humility and self-awareness are one of the under-appreciated skills of a CEO. I think what it does is it allows you to see gaps very clearly in yourself and also your team. And then that in turn allows you to hire the right people to fill those gaps and really build a team that's going to be aligned, resilient and be the team that's going to be there. If you look at our team, we have a lot of the same folks for a very long time, and I think that's one of the most undervalued skills.

ADAM SOLOMON (12:12):

Super. So we mentioned Intel 471 is a global business and that doesn't just mean office in London. It is a truly global business and has taken you to some corners of the world. I'm dying for some stories from the trenches.

JASON PASSWATER (12:32):

Yeah, I mean we've, geez, when I think back to even my days in the Marines, I've done more, I think exciting and crazy stuff outside of the Marines than in this commercial threat intelligence space over the last, what, 15 years or so. But over my career in the threat intelligence space, I found myself flying back and forth between Taiwan and China. That was always interesting. You're doing threat intelligence conceptually back then. It was an interesting thing. I found myself in the Himalayas up in D Marsala. We had been talking to the Tibetan government in exile up there working with them a little bit. This is back in the day. That was a very interesting flight from Delhi to D Marsala. I think it's about a 13 hour series of near death experiences to get up there. So that was fun. And then the company, a lot of the company was built, the core of the company, was built in Ukraine.

(13:38):

I've really seen the situation in Ukraine even before we started the company. I was working there and really kind of happened over the years and how it impacted the company. I mean, we still have people displaced, but I'm very familiar with working. I love Kiev walking up and down Kresha Avenue. A lot of the heart of the company was built there, so that's been a really good experience as well. Great. It's funny because one of the things that I was going to say is how, what's surprised me is when I talk to you guys, you guys are just totally super excited about our world and we're so desensitized to it and I'm more excited about your guys' world -

ADAM SOLOMON (14:24):

World, which I can't say that on this podcast, but I'm totally desensitized to that.

JASON PASSWATER (14:31):

Okay, cool. You remember when I said there's probably on one hand I can count the amount of people that are in the, so there's a couple that that I'll engage with on, but I don't really have anything of substance that I could probably say to that. No, my dog's low energy. My first thing is to roll over and grab my phone. I probably like everybody else these days, roll over, grab my phone and then get the espresso machine going for coffee for my wife and I and then I'm in the office.

ADAM SOLOMON (15:13):

After I get dressed. I was hoping you had something better as Marine.

JASON PASSWATER (15:15):

I know, I know. That's the thing about me is if you saw pictures of me as a Marine, you would be like, that's not a Marine. I have really long hair. Everybody sees me. They're like, oh, that's a typical marine. But the reason I left is I was the guy that was always questioning, we can do this better, we can do this better, we can do it a different way.

ADAM SOLOMON (15:34):

So no 5:00 AM

JASON PASSWATER(15:35):

Pre-work.

ADAM SOLOMON (15:35):

Workouts?

JASON PASSWATER (15:36):

No, no. Look, I played the game,

ADAM SOLOMON (15:38):

I did.

JASON PASSWATER (15:38):

All of that stuff, but now, no, no, because I stay up super late. I sleep very little, but I do try to find time to exercise.

ADAM SOLOMON (15:48):

Yeah. So I'm hoping you have an interesting answer to this because you're an ex-Marine and I'm assuming there's a lot of discipline involved, but could you tell me about your morning routine? Well, thank you again. Thank you for coming on. This has been a lot of fun and it's been a great four years and I cannot wait to see what the future holds for us.

JASON PASSWATER (16:10):

Yeah, likewise. Thank you for having me.