Dan Magy On Selling A Company To Blue Halo For Nine Figures And Now Raising $50 Million To 3D-Print Drones In 20-Foot Container-Sized Spaces

Dan Magy’s journey from a sun-soaked surf town in Southern California to building some of the most impactful defense technology in modern warfare doesn’t follow any conventional path. He’s not a coder, nor does he claim to be a technical wizard. But what Dan lacks in technical prowess, he makes up for in vision, grit, and relentless curiosity.

Dan’s latest venture, Firestorm Labs has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Harpoon VC, 645 Ventures, Feld Ventures, and Lockheed Martin Ventures.

In this episode, you will learn:

• You don’t need to be technical to build deep tech—just relentlessly customer-focused and vision-driven.
• Great products are built when complexity is hidden, and user experience is prioritized.
• Resilience and pattern recognition are the real superpowers in fundraising and scaling.
• Fanpics taught Dan that timing and incentive alignment are everything in tough industries like sports.
• Citadel’s success came from solving a real battlefield problem, not just building cool tech.
• Firestorm is reimagining defense manufacturing with 3D-printed, modular, multi-mission drones.
• It takes just as much effort to build something small as something massive, so always aim big.

 

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About Dan Magy:

Dan Magy has diverse work experience in various industries. He co-founded Firestorm Labs in May 2022 and is currently serving as a Co-Founder.

In July 2022, Dan joined Bonsai Robotics as a Chief Strategy Advisor. He is also a Board Member at Beyond Capital since June 2022. In 2019, he co-founded Elevate and served as a Board Member.

Prior to that, Dan founded Citadel Defense Company in 2016, which was later acquired by Blue Halo in November 2021. From 2019 to 2020, he worked as an Entrepreneur In Residence at the University of California, San Diego.

In 2012, Dan co-founded Fanpics, which was later acquired. He also worked as an Intelligence and Strategy Analyst at Langley Intelligence Group in 2012.

In 2010, Dan worked as a Snorkel & Scuba Guide at Adventure Club Koh Phi Phi, and from 2009 to 2010, he worked as a Teacher and Administrator at Sogang University.

Dan Magy has attended The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and UCLA, but the specific years and degrees obtained are not provided.

Connect with Dan Magy:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• PitchBook
• TheOrg

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMaker Show. Today, we have a very exciting founder joining us—a founder who has done it multiple times. We’re going to be talking about what it means to build a company without really being a technical co-founder, especially when he’s been working on deep tech-type of stuff.

Dan Magy: Hey, thanks for having me.

Alejandro Cremades: He has two exits under his belt and is now working on his next baby—which is a rocket ship. We’ll be talking about that in just a little bit, along with all the good stuff: building, scaling, financing, and exiting. The full cycle, which we love to hear. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Dan Magy. Welcome to the show.

Dan Magy: Hey, thanks for having me.

Alejandro Cremades: So Dan, originally born in San Diego. Give us a walk down memory lane—what was life like growing up for you?

Dan Magy: Yeah, it was pretty interesting. I grew up in what I’ll call one of the older San Diego or Southern California surf towns. Now, all these communities are filled with three, four, five-million-dollar houses. But back when I was growing up, there were still horses on our street…

Dan Magy: …and avocado farms. So it was really cool. I had very pro-education parents, so we spent a lot of time outside at the beach, playing sports, but also taking our studies pretty seriously. I ended up reading a lot as a child, and I think that’s helped me throughout my whole life.

Dan Magy: Pretty quintessential Southern California experience, I’d say. I have a lot of cherished memories—and that’s probably what brought me back to San Diego later in life. I’m sure we’ll get to that a little bit later.

Alejandro Cremades: You did travel quite a bit before you actually did so. We’re talking about Asia, London. What really got you to decide to get out of the whole California area?

Dan Magy: Yeah, I’m a big believer that you can kind of treat life a little bit like a game. And for me in particular, I really wanted to have a bunch of different experiences to figure out what I liked and what I was good at.

Dan Magy: I think one of my skills is that I’m incredibly comfortable being uncomfortable. I’ve lived in some not-so-awesome housing in different parts of the world, but it didn’t really matter because I was there to have experiences, work on myself, and learn new things—or try different jobs. I was an English teacher in South Korea…

Dan Magy: …a snorkel and scuba guide in Thailand, and then lived and started my first company in London after grad school.

Alejandro Cremades: So how do you go from scuba diving in Thailand to all of a sudden being in London? That’s quite the shift of gears.

Dan Magy: Yeah. I think the story for how I got there is even better. A bunch of us became really good friends while teaching English in South Korea. We decided we were going to travel around Southeast Asia for a number of months before everyone went back to the “real world.”

Dan Magy: I was walking out of a bar at like 10 o’clock at night, and there was a sign on a scuba shop that said, “English-speaking tour guide needed.” I told the guys as they were closing up that I was going to come take that job.

Dan Magy: They probably just saw some drunk guy and were like, “Alright, get out of here.” But I showed up the next morning in the bootleg Lacoste polo T-shirt I bought at the market on the way over.

Dan Magy: I actually decided to wait a year to go to grad school so I could do that. It was awesome. It was a very physically demanding job. You’d work two four-hour shifts doing tours—or one big long shift in the day. Then you’d come back, clean up the shop, fill the tanks, and sell the next day’s trips. We’re talking really long hours…

Dan Magy: …but it was probably one of the best times of my life. We lived on this island called Koh Phi Phi in Thailand—it’s famous from the Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Beach.

Dan Magy: And it was actually while I was working there that I met a guy named Will Dickinson, who was an English guy on his gap year, and who I ended up starting FanPix with. It was incredibly fortuitous.

Dan Magy: Again, it’s just an example of how, if you go out there, take risks, and stay open to new ideas and people, you’ll meet some really interesting folks—and your life will take some very unique directions.

Alejandro Cremades: So once you got out of Thailand, you went to London, did grad school—you went to the London School of Economics, one of the top schools for business.

Alejandro Cremades: And in this case, you decided to pack your bags, go back home, and start a company, FanPix, as you were alluding to.

Alejandro Cremades: Why did you turn back to California instead of staying in Europe?

Dan Magy: Yeah, sir, you’re going to open a whole can of worms with this one.

Dan Magy: Let’s just say this: the fundraising environment in the UK—this was probably 2010, 2011—was atrocious. I think the best offer we got was a maybe: £250,000 for 35% of the company.

Dan Magy: We ended up moving to New York for a few months before settling in San Diego. We ended up raising $4.5 million at a $25 million valuation for our idea.

Dan Magy: I think that really speaks to a broader story. When you talk to entrepreneurs who go the VC-backed route, a lot of folks in America—especially in California—know someone, whether a family member or friend, who got rich doing tech.

Dan Magy: So, one, there’s that cowboy mentality: people from all over the world come here to do something different and maybe make a lot of money. And two, there’s just this cultural mindset embedded in the U.S., even outside the immigrant communities, that says—you can make a fortune here.

Dan Magy: I don’t think you always have that same opportunity in Europe. A lot of my friends who stayed there work at banks or as consultants. A number work in government. These are all really smart people.

Dan Magy: I think the entrepreneurial ecosystem is a lot better now than it was 15 years ago. But the U.S. has been supercharged with 30–40 years of massive exits, you know what I mean?

Alejandro Cremades: Absolutely. Now let’s talk about FanPix. You ended up going to California, raising money—but before that, what were you guys doing at FanPix? How did the whole idea and concept come together?

Dan Magy: Yeah, the gist is really simple. It’s all based around sports and spending time with your family. I don’t know if you’re a sports fan, but I’m sure you can think of a big game you’ve gone to or watched on TV.

Dan Magy: And when your team scores a goal, hits a home run, wins the game—whatever—everyone hugs each other and jumps around.

Dan Magy: The whole idea was: you know when you go on Splash Mountain at Disneyland and get that reaction picture of yourself like this? We basically built a robotic camera system that you’d put in sports stadiums. It was so fast that it could take pictures of everyone in the stadium in real-time, so you could get those reaction photos of you and your loved ones sent to your phone.

Dan Magy: It was a really cool idea—just a little ahead of its time.

Dan Magy: The biggest lesson we learned is that sports is a tough business because so much money comes from TV. A lot of times, the fan experience suffers. Teams are trying to get better at that now…

Dan Magy: …but think about this: a lot of sports franchises, no matter how good or bad they are, get a check for a couple hundred million dollars every year. It’s the most amazing business of all time. So the incentive structure isn’t always aligned to deliver the best in-stadium fan experience.

Alejandro Cremades: No kidding. So what ended up being the business model? How were you guys monetizing?

Dan Magy: We’d put the cameras in and then do a revenue share with the teams by selling sponsorship on the pictures.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s pretty cool. You guys ran that for about three years, and I believe you raised a total of around $8 million. How was the fundraising journey for your first rodeo?

Dan Magy: It’s tough. You don’t know what you don’t know. But if you can be comfortable being uncomfortable, and understand that when investors tell you “no,” it’s usually not about you—it’s about the business 95% of the time…

Dan Magy: …you learn not to take it personally. You learn the resilience to get knocked down and get right back up.

Dan Magy: If you can separate those things in your brain—because no one likes rejection—and remember that investors are just doing their job, it gets more comfortable over time.

Alejandro Cremades: In your case, that first exit came when FanPix was acquired. What was that like—going through an acquisition and seeing the full cycle?

Dan Magy: Yeah, we were acquired during COVID, which was a really hard time for anything related to live sports.

Dan Magy: I think the company was a couple of years too early. If I had to guess, I’d say it would do really, really well right now.

Dan Magy: But again, you don’t have the same incentive structure elsewhere as the team owner does—because they get that check regardless.

Dan Magy: We didn’t really make any money on the deal, but it was a process. And going through it helped set us up for success later on.

Alejandro Cremades: Speaking of later on, your next chapter was Citadel. How did that idea come about, and how did you know it was time to go for it?

Dan Magy: I think what I’ve learned is that if you stay attuned to what’s around you, opportunities will come to do interesting things.

Dan Magy: In 2015, I started getting asked at a bunch of sports stadiums—while I was still at FanPix—whether I could build a drone defense system.

Dan Magy: We had a problem with drones coming into stadiums. So that was 2015. By 2016–early 2017, the Naval Special Warfare—the Navy SEALs—came and found us and took our system to Iraq to fight ISIS.

Dan Magy: We were actually building the system for airports and sports stadiums, which was the world I understood. FanPix was great—those were vitamins.

Dan Magy: But defending against a terrorist attack? That’s like a vaccine. And people will pay a lot more for a vaccine.

Dan Magy: It was kind of by chance that we became a defense contractor.

Dan Magy: They found us because they had a big problem. The big primes—Lockheed, SRC—weren’t working in Iraq, and ISIS was using these drones. So they got desperate and started looking for other solutions.

Alejandro Cremades: I want to ask you about that. What’s it like selling to the government—to the Department of Defense?

Dan Magy: It’s really tough. It’s also a game.

Dan Magy: The best technology doesn’t always win. You have to understand a few things: what are the existing requirements?

Dan Magy: And if there aren’t any, how do you create them?

Dan Magy: Second, you need to understand how your solution fits into the guidelines for deploying technology on the battlefield.

Dan Magy: And finally, sometimes you have to find the money for it.

Dan Magy: A lot of people are excited about defense tech right now, and they think it’s having a moment. But we didn’t know any of this when we first started. We learned by getting punched in the face every single day—and by hiring people who knew how to do it.

Dan Magy: But once you understand the process—and the process is long, complicated, and takes a lot of money—you realize that all you have to do is get a slice of these defense budgets, and you can build massive companies. Defense is a big business.

Alejandro Cremades: No kidding. In this case, you guys raised about $13 million. Was it a little bit easier the second time around, since you were an exited founder and people were now giving you the money a little more easily?

Dan Magy: Yeah, so FanPix hadn’t been transacted yet, so I was kind of learning those lessons again at that point. But it didn’t really matter, because again, it was that resilience we learned the first time—knowing you’re going to hear “no” a lot along the way.

Dan Magy: And again, we had some really good gold-star customers in the United States Naval Special Warfare community who were saying, “This is going to be a big company. This is a good technology.” We really got the right folks to buy into it.

Dan Magy: In fact, one of the investors in Citadel is also my investor at Firestorm, but we’ll tell that story later. So yeah, it is easier every time you do anything in life—you know what I mean? I definitely think that was defense wave one. We’re clearly in defense wave two now. I mean, some of these valuations are crazy, and we’ll talk about that later.

Dan Magy: But yeah, it was really about understanding the pattern recognition that you have something special and understanding customer demands. Then it’s about executing on the product side to get it where it needs to be in order to unlock some of the bigger contracts.

Alejandro Cremades: Now in your case, especially for you—not being a technical co-founder—how has it been, whether with FanPix, Citadel, or now Firestorm, being on the non-technical side?

Dan Magy: It’s a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because I can become the ultimate power user. If I can figure out how to use the technology, I represent your average user.

Dan Magy: That’s something we try to do with every company we’ve started—simplify and make the experience incredible when it comes to using the product.

Dan Magy: I want all the complicated stuff to happen behind the scenes, but I just want the customer to be surprised and delighted—and have it be really easy to use.

Dan Magy: A lot of times, the customer will help take you down that kind of path. We have a test at FanPix and Firestorm that we call the “Dan test,” which means I need to be able to set up and use a drone by myself.

Dan Magy: I think that’s a really important lesson a lot of people who are designing and building products should be thinking about.

Dan Magy: Now, how it’s a curse is I have to go into meetings and ask a variety of questions to make sure I’m getting to the center of truth—because I can’t actually build, I can’t write the code.

Dan Magy: But again, that’s muscle memory—just like raising money. The more you do it, the more you understand people, the more your BS meter gets tuned.

Dan Magy: There are just some basic principles around asking and pushing engineers to do stuff. I spent a lot of time in my twenties reading books on best practices for that. Am I the best? No.

Dan Magy: But I like to say I can set the vision, raise the money, and then hire the people who are much better at that than me.

Alejandro Cremades: No kidding. Now for Citadel—another exit. In this case, it was nine figures. Walk us through how that happened, the timing, and what you’ve learned about timing when it comes to getting your company acquired.

Dan Magy: Yeah, the timing on this one was interesting. The company was at this inflection point—do we go raise more money, or what do we do?

Dan Magy: The acquirer was a company called Blue Halo. They were buying a number of future defense tech companies to put into one portfolio.

Dan Magy: The idea was, “Hey, we have all this future defense tech. We can offer this to the government and help you stay ahead of the pacing threat,” which was—and continues to be—China.

Dan Magy: What was interesting is we closed the transaction a couple of months before we won a massive, multi-hundred-million-dollar contract.

Dan Magy: So all the founders, the team—everybody had a really good exit. And the investors.

Dan Magy: But if the gods had moved things around a little differently, it might’ve been an even bigger outcome.

Dan Magy: The thing I’m most proud of, though, is that to this day, a couple of times a month, we talk to people who say that product—the anti-drone system—saved their life.

Dan Magy: I had one just a week ago. And it’s still incredible, because so much of what we do in our lives is in front of a computer screen, you know what I mean?

Dan Magy: When you have people doing dangerous things in dangerous areas tell you, “Wow, that made a big difference,” it’s really, really special.

Dan Magy: The most memorable one for me: the night of my wedding, we had this big party after the reception. One of my Navy buddies who was at the wedding ran into another Navy guy at the after-party who had just come back from a dangerous zone.

Dan Magy: Our system had saved his life two weeks before. He came up to me, just so excited, and said he didn’t think he’d be here if the system we built hadn’t been protecting them.

Dan Magy: He bought me this huge bottle of tequila and said, “We had a bunch of drones come at us, and the system stopped them from getting to our position.”

Dan Magy: It’s really cool when you go through that part of the process and, years later, the Citadel product—which lives on under the name Titan—is still having a profound impact on people.

Dan Magy: It’s a really magical feeling. And I don’t know—I can’t quite describe it unless you’ve experienced it, you know what I mean?

Alejandro Cremades: I hear you. So let’s talk about Firestorm Labs. Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. This is your third time around. I’m sure you really thought through why it made sense to tackle this one.

Dan Magy: Yeah, the idea came to us in the buildup to the war in Ukraine. I always thought we should have a begrudging respect for how ISIS used DJI drones—ones you can buy at Best Buy—to fight the best special forces in the world to a standstill for months in Iraq and Syria.

Dan Magy: The whole idea is: why buy one drone for one mission? You should buy one drone that can do multiple missions.

Dan Magy: This time around, I knew exactly what we needed from a founding team standpoint.

Dan Magy: Ian, my CTO, is an aerospace engineer with a background in additive manufacturing—3D printing. And Chad McCoy, he was at JSOC, a super elite special operations group.

Dan Magy: He’s been on a bunch of important raids and used a lot of cutting-edge technologies. He’s famous for being on the team that saved Captain Phillips.

Dan Magy: I needed the engineer, and I needed the guy with a ton of credibility who was eager to learn.

Dan Magy: My job was to get the right customer feedback on the product side and raise the money to build the team and execute.

Dan Magy: We self-funded it for a year, and then we started bringing in a lot of defense investors.

Dan Magy: I’ll tell you, even the ecosystem for defense investors at the end of 2022 and early 2023—it was nowhere near the feeding frenzy happening today. Defense tech is now a massive category. But even two years ago, it was just so-so.

Alejandro Cremades: So how do you guys make money with Firestorm?

Dan Magy: We do a couple different things. We build a variety of multi-mission drones. We can build them in about a tenth the time at about a fifth the cost.

Dan Magy: And we’ve invested millions of dollars to figure out how to put industrial 3D printing systems into 20-foot containers. So now, you can have a factory anywhere in the world.

Dan Magy: A factory is no longer a fixed warehouse. We’ve modularized the whole thing. And now, we’re not just making our drones—we’re fixing other people’s drones, printing other people’s drones, printing parts to military vehicles…

Dan Magy: …working on medical braces. It’s incredible what happens when you give the end customer a technology like this that they haven’t had before. They start flooding you with problems they want solved.

Dan Magy: It’s quite incredible.

Alejandro Cremades: You guys have raised quite a bit. How much have you raised, why did you choose the investors you did, and tell us that fun story about a repeated investor.

Dan Magy: Yeah, we’ve raised right around $50 million.

Dan Magy: We’ve systematically taken the lessons learned from Citadel. We have companies like Lockheed Martin on our cap table. That’s important, because as much as people want to fix the defense acquisition process…

Dan Magy: …until it’s fixed, you’ve got to play by the old rules. Having someone like Lockheed on the cap table is really good. We’ve probably done over a billion dollars in contract bids with them.

Dan Magy: We haven’t won a billion dollars of contracts—let’s be clear—but they’re bringing us into a lot of really interesting programs they can’t solve themselves. They’re relying on smaller, more flexible companies.

Dan Magy: We raised a lot of money because this is a big, potentially generational business. The way we build drones today—we build them like Ferraris.

Dan Magy: We don’t need to build them like Ferraris. The Ukrainians and Russians have shown us: you need to build them like minivans—cheap, abundant, and modular.

Dan Magy: So we started by breaking the mold of what we’re building. And now we think the even bigger opportunity is industrial 3D printing.

Dan Magy: When selling to the DoD, you have to show them things. We do a lot of roadshows with expensive systems to show what’s possible.

Dan Magy: It’s very different from consumer tech. If Apple says they’re going to build something, I kind of believe they’ll do it. The DoD has been burned so many times—they’re skeptical until proven otherwise.

Dan Magy: That’s the other lesson we learned: you’ve got to prove the skeptics wrong.

Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about the future. Let’s say you go to sleep tonight and wake up in a world where Firestorm’s vision is fully realized. What does that world look like?

Dan Magy: I think we have the ability to revolutionize warfare—and how do you do that? By developing technologies that stop aggressive nations from attacking others.

Dan Magy: That’s our big thing. We think deterrence is important. But we’re spending too much on deterrence right now, and the way we think about and build drones needs to fundamentally change across the West.

Dan Magy: We need to look at drones as disposable—95% of them will be lost. So again, don’t build them like Ferraris. Build them like minivans.

Dan Magy: Put infrastructure in place around the world to manufacture and repair systems—to bring costs down across the military by using our printing systems.

Alejandro Cremades: Now let’s talk about the past with a lens of reflection. Let’s say I put you into a time machine and bring you back to when you were coming out of the London School of Economics, about to start FanPix. What advice would you give your younger self before taking the plunge?

Dan Magy: I would have taken the job at BlackRock. No, I’m totally kidding.

Dan Magy: Honestly, it’s a great question and one I think about constantly. My advice to my younger self would be: it takes just as much time to do something very big as it does to do something very small.

Dan Magy: It really does. So dream big, don’t be afraid to fail, and jump in there and go for it.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. For those listening who would love to reach out and say hi, what’s the best way?

Dan Magy: LinkedIn. That’s the best way for me—Dan Magy. I’ve got a black-and-white profile picture. I think there’s a second Dan Magy—he’s my cousin in Michigan.

Dan Magy: But we’re the San Diego Dan Magy here. Reach out, say hi, add me, and let’s chat.

Alejandro Cremades: Wonderful. Dan, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It’s been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Dan Magy: Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.

*****

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