He Sold A Company To Blue Halo For Nine Figures And Now Raised $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—traits that have fueled three startups, two exits, and a defense tech rocket ship called Firestorm Labs.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Southern California Roots and a Global Mindset

Growing up in an older surf town in San Diego, Dan describes a childhood that blended the idyllic beach lifestyle with a deep respect for education. “There were still horses on our street,” he laughs. “And avocado farms. It was this really beautiful balance of freedom and discipline.”

Dan’s early years were shaped by a hunger for experience. “I believe in treating life a

little like a game,” he says. That philosophy led him to places like South Korea, where he taught English at the Sogang University.

Dan also traveled to Thailand, where he spontaneously became a scuba guide after walking past a shop with a “Help Wanted” sign. That unplanned detour didn’t just shape his worldview—it led him to meet Will Dickinson, his co-founder for his first company, Fanpics.

Looking back on this stint, Dan describes working a very physically demanding job with two four-hour shifts or one very long day shift. He had to clean the store, fill the tanks, and set up trips for the next day.

Dan enjoyed the gruelling schedule and considers it one of the best times of his life. They lived on Koh Phi Phi in Thailand, the island immortalized in the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, The Beach. Later, Dan moved to London and entered the London School of Economics, the top business school.

In 2010-2011, the fundraising environment in the UK was highly challenging. The best offer founders could expect was £250K for a 35% stake in the company. Eventually, Dan packed his bags and moved to New York, where he stayed for a few months before moving to San Diego.

Dan raised $4.5M at a $25M valuation for his idea there. In contrast, Dan believes such opportunities are lacking in European countries. Most of his friends continued working in banks, became consultants, or worked in the government.

15 years down the road, the startup ecosystem is much more developed than it was at the time.

Fanpics: A Vitamin for Sports Fans

Fanpics was Dan’s first shot at building a tech company, without being a technical founder. The idea was charmingly simple and undeniably cool.

They had robotic cameras installed in sports stadiums that captured real-time reaction photos of fans during major moments and delivered them directly to their phones. Think: a personalized, digital souvenir of your team’s game-winning touchdown.

Despite being ahead of its time, the venture faced brutal truths about the sports industry. “TV money dominates everything,” Dan says. “Fan experience isn’t prioritized when every team gets a couple hundred million dollars annually, no matter how bad they are.”

Still, Fanpics raised $8M and partnered with major teams to earn revenue shares by selling sponsorships on the pictures. The company ran for three years and laid the groundwork for Dan’s first full-cycle founder experience—from ideation to capital raising to acquisition.

“We didn’t really make money on the deal,” Dan admits of the exit during COVID. “But we learned. And that helped set us up for what came next.” He learned not to take investor disinterest personally and to be resilient in the face of rejection.

Citadel Defense Company: From Stadiums to Battlefields

What came next was anything but expected. In 2015, while still at Fanpics, stadiums began asking Dan a strange question: “Can you build a drone defense system?” They were tackling the problem of drones entering sports stadiums.

That curiosity snowballed into the founding of Citadel Defense Company—a counter-drone company that ended up deploying systems in Iraq to combat ISIS drone threats in 2016-2017. Navy SEALs in Naval Special Warfare used their drones.

Citadel’s path to defense contracting wasn’t easy. The defense world is infamous for red tape, opaque procurement processes, and skeptical gatekeepers. Dan and his team had to comply with guidelines for employing different technologies on the battlefield.

“The best tech doesn’t always win,” Dan explains. “You have to navigate requirements, deployment doctrine, and even find the money yourself.” The process is long and complicated. Still, they did it.

Citadel raised $13M, got battlefield validation from elite military units like the United States Naval Special Warfare community, and eventually sold the company in a nine-figure exit to Blue Halo. This company was buying different future defense tech companies to add to a single portfolio.

Months later, Citadel (now rebranded as Titan) won a multi-hundred-million-dollar contract. But Dan didn’t find the financial outcome most meaningful.

“At my wedding afterparty, a Navy guy told me our system had saved his life two weeks earlier. That moment? That’s what it’s all about,” Dan says. It’s about making a difference for “people doing dangerous things in dangerous areas.”

Entrepreneurship and the Dan Test

As Dan sees it, entrepreneurship is all about understanding the pattern recognition that you have a unique product to meet customer demands. Next, it’s about executing on the product side and getting it where it needs to be to unlock the bigger contracts.

Being a non-technical person, Dan believes in making the user experience incredible when using the product. He wants to push the complicated aspects behind the scenes so the customer is surprised and delighted to have a product that is really easy to use.

Dan instituted a test at Fanpics and Citadel called the Dan Test. He wanted to be able to set up and use the drone himself, which was an important lesson for the engineers designing the product.

Dan makes it a point to go into meetings and ask a bunch of questions to get to the center of the truth. Like his customers, he can’t build or write code for the drone. So, over the years, he has developed some basic principles for motivating his engineers in the right direction.

Firestorm Labs: Making Minivan Drones, Not Ferraris

With two exits under his belt, Dan could’ve easily gone into venture or taken a break. Instead, he launched Firestorm Labs, a company born out of the war in Ukraine and a hard-earned understanding of modern warfare.

The thesis is bold: “We build drones like Ferraris. We need to build them like minivans.” Dan aimed to develop drones capable of performing multiple missions. These drones should be affordable, customizable, and produced in large quantities.

To make that happen, Dan brought in Ian, his CTO, an aerospace engineer with a background in additive manufacturing, a.k.a. 3D printing.

Dan also brought Chad McCoy from the JSOC, a super elite engineer in the special operations group, on board. Chad had been on important raids and used several interesting technologies. He’s famous for being on the team that saved Captain Phillips.

Dan’s strategy was to build a credible, eager-to-learn team. He also ensured they got the right customer feedback on the product side and then raised the money to execute it. In the initial months, Firestorm was bootstrapped but started bringing in defense investors in 2023.

Firestorm Business Model and Raising Funding

Firestorm builds modular, multi-mission drones that are affordable, flexible, and made with 3D-printed parts in containerized, mobile factories. Dan ensures they can be built in about a tenth of the time at about a fifth of the cost.

“A factory shouldn’t be a building with a roof,” Dan says. “We can drop a 20-foot container anywhere and start producing drones, parts for vehicles, even medical braces.”

And the business model? It’s not just drone sales. Firestorm also repairs other manufacturers’ drones, makes replacement parts, licenses its modular manufacturing systems, and prints parts for military vehicles..

Dan and his team have raised $50M and brought in top-tier investors like Lockheed Martin, who are opening doors to massive government contracts and challenging and interesting programs. Firestorm customers have problems they rely on smaller, more flexible companies to solve.

Storytelling is everything that Dan Magy was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

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On Timing, Grit, and Dreaming Big

Dan has seen firsthand how timing can make or break a startup. Citadel’s exit came just before a massive contract win. Fanpics might’ve been huge if the market were ready. Firestorm is catching the wave of a new defense tech boom.

As Dan points out, they can revolutionize warfare by developing technologies that stop aggressive nations from attacking others. At present, we are focused on deterrence, which is very important. However, how we build and view drones needs to change fundamentally across the West.

In Dan’s opinion, we need to develop the infrastructure worldwide to not only support the manufacturing and repair of these systems, but also bring down the costs across the military for fixing, repairing, and deploying things that we can do with our printing systems.

A Piece of Advice in Conclusion

Dan’s biggest advice to his younger self? “It takes just as much time to build something big as it does to build something small. So dream big.” From selling scuba tours to life-saving defense systems, Dan Magy proves that great founders aren’t always great engineers.

Sometimes, they’re just relentless learners, master communicators, and bold enough to chase big ideas—even when they don’t have all the answers. And for Dan, the journey’s far from over.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• 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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For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here). 

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

 

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