EP 78 — Epsilon3’s Laura Crabtree on Compliance as a Trust Signal for Defense Customers

Mission-critical operations run on Excel spreadsheets and PDFs — until miscommunications destroy hardware. Laura Crabtree, Co-founder & CEO of Epsilon3, built the company after discovering there were no commercially available operations software that teams actually wanted to use. She proved 10x value over 5-year internal development costs, let early adopters try indefinitely, then initiated payment conversations that converted because she solved real equipment destruction problems. Laura breaks down digitizing mission control procedures for distributed teams, navigating government contracting vehicles without a playbook, and why finding DOD buyers with purchasing power is harder than identifying end users.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:18 Early career at Northrop Grumman and moving overseas
03:26 Joining SpaceX during commercial resupply contract
08:47 Eight years designing efficient operations at SpaceX
11:51 Doug Hurley's call from orbit
15:10 Identifying the market gap for operations software
21:41 How Epsilon3 digitizes control room operations
25:38 Different use cases across launch, satellite, and testing
29:07 Commercial space vs defense program differences
31:48 Government contracting challenges and learning curve
34:39 FedRamp compliance process and data security trust
36:37 Early adopter acquisition and payment conversion
38:29 Pricing strategy: 10x value calculation
42:25 Female executives in aerospace and support networks