On this episode of Beyond Strategy, we are thrilled to welcome Shubhi Mishra, the fearless CEO and Founder of RAFT. Known for its innovative approach to federal contracting, RAFT is revolutionizing how technology and data are used to solve critical government challenges. From systems modernization to advanced data analytics, RAFT has quickly established itself as a leader in the federal market, delivering impactful solutions for mission-critical agencies.

In this inspiring conversation, Shubhi opens up about the leadership principles that have guided her entrepreneurial journey and shares the bold risks she’s taken along the way. From the origins of RAFT to embracing fear as part of her growth strategy, Shubhi reveals how getting comfortable with uncertainty has been pivotal to her success.

We dive into her vision for RAFT, the challenges she set out to solve, and the unique branding that sets her company apart in the competitive GovCon space. Shubhi also discusses the evolving nature of leadership in a growing organization, the cultural “it” factor driving RAFT’s success, and the recent growth capital investment from Washington Harbour Partners.

Whether you're a seasoned leader, an aspiring entrepreneur, or simply curious about the intersection of innovation and leadership, this episode is packed with valuable insights, practical lessons, and a fearless perspective on growth.

Tune in to hear Shubhi’s journey of risk-taking, leadership evolution, and balancing bold ambitions with a personal touch. You won’t want to miss this one!

Hi, hello, and welcome back, Jenn, to Beyond Strategy, an ACG National Capital Region Podcast focused on the leaders that drive innovation, enhance understanding, and achieve market-clearing outcomes in the National Capital Region. After a long delay, I hope you still know that I am Andy McEnroe of Raymond James Defense & Government Investment Banking team.

I am Jenn Wappaus of the Infinity Group at RBC Wealth Management.

It's been so long Jenn didn't even remember her last name.

I know.

We're thrilled to be back. The last time we spoke with you, we were speaking with Jonathan Moneymaker, comparing his acquisition of Eqlipse to the Eagles acquisition of Saquon Barkley. The Eagles are the No. 2 seed heading into the NFC playoffs. BlueHalo announced a deal with AeroVironment

Yes.

I'm not saying we're prophets or a swami, but we may be. Today we're super excited because we are sitting down with the CEO of Raft, Shubhi Mishra, who has done a tremendous job bringing a company that's solving complex problems to the forefront and solving those problems for mission outcomes across the DOD, and national security community.

Raft, if you don't know them, is a leading Defense Technology Company, dedicated to empowering the US military, and government agencies with cutting-edge AIML, and data solutions. The company transforms complex data into actionable insights, enabling mission-critical decisions, and changing the way the US and its allies fight across all domains. Raft modular platforms are designed to eliminate operational friction and data fatigue, ensuring that their customers have the correct information at the most appropriate time to achieve mission success.

I think the biggest thing here is hearing Shubhi talk about how they're solving hard problems, how she started this company and really built this brand that they've put together at Raft.

In this conversation with Shubhi, you'll hear her views on how to establish a dynamic culture and how some of the most important lessons come from her background growing up and embracing, as she describes it, running towards fear to achieve an outstanding outcome.

Here's our discussion with Shubhi.

We are excited to be joined today on Beyond Strategy by Shubhi Mishra, CEO and founder of Raft. Shubhi, thank you for being here.

Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Jenn.

Before we dive into the conversation today, and what you've built and are continuing to build at Raft, I'd like to start this interview with a leadership-oriented question. What is the most important leadership principle that has guided you through the creation of Raft?

Running towards fear with a lot of courage.

That's a really interesting response. I would love to unpack that a little bit because I assume any good story begins with its origins. Did the idea of Raft come out of running towards fear, or some life experience that brought that about?

Growing up, still to the date, have always been an underdog, where part of an underdog journey is people questioning, "Is it even possible? Are you for real?" To do the possible, to convert the impossible, to solve hard problems requires a lot of courage and running towards fear. Raft's journey, and my journey has been all around that. Coming from growing up in India, having big dreams, thinking about, "That's not possible. You got to be a doctor to have big dreams." It's like, "No, never mind. Not going to do that."

Very linear path for me, I wanted to have a challenge and solve heart problems. Came to the US because this is the country that impacts the entire world. Came to this city that has such a big impact beyond the country on the entire world. Then got obsessed and found myself surrounded by the hardest problem that's around and get impacted for every human being that is connected in this world. Everyone told me, "You are crazy to go into GovTech. You're crazy to find these problem sets that have not been solved in decades, in centuries. Who are you, an outsider, taking on this challenge? There's a better way."

I'm glad I had the passion to run towards fear with a lot of courage. I'm glad that I was stupid and hungry and foolish. Here we are at. Idea of Raft came from just making the impossible possible and changing the way we fight, defending the nation that in turn defense the entire world and making this beautiful place that I live in safe for the generations ahead.

What was that spark or that inspiration now that led you to want to start a business? Because a lot of people try to solve problems in this world by joining an organization or participating in government. For you, it was a different path, and it's taken it to one of leadership and building a rapidly growing government contractor.

I wish when people tell me, "Do this." I'm like, "But there's a better way." For me, that better way was, "If you don't want to listen to me on how this problem needs to be solved, I'll just figure it out myself and solve it my way." That was the real idea of starting the business. I wish folks, my mentors, and my bosses were kind enough to tell me you're wrong. That was the reason why I'm like I'm going to prove to them and everywhere around, "We know you're wrong." That's how Raft started.

You've brought up a couple of times in this conversation already the desire to solve a problem. What was problem one, or where was our ground truth in starting this problem-solving endeavor?

Data. Data is the foundation of any ecosystem. It's a foundation of a house. Raft wanted to start with the foundation, data was the foundation. My background I'm a data engineer and a lawyer. All of that I knew we could not build a house, the country could not change how we fought, we could not defend the nation if we didn't have our data in order. Through Raft, all of our products, suite of products, we focus on data first and then using AI layer on top of data.

Let's switch categories here for a second and talk about branding. Because Raft has a really unique brand in the market. It's demonstrated by your leadership team having a Let's Fucking Go! song on your website and profiles for each of you. What's the driving influence around the Raft brand, and how do you describe that?

It is what you just said, it's LFG. That is the Raft brand.

I didn't know data engineers were into that.

It's a very unique data engineer that you're talking to right now.

I think the gist of the question is really, there's a lot of government contractors out there that try to do similar things to what Raft is doing. I assume, and we've talked about this before off a recording that a lot of the recruiting and excitement and buzz around Raft comes from the branding, the messaging, the cool, my hands are in quotation since this is an audio podcast, brand, and reputation that you have in the market that attracts potentially, I don't know your company's demographics that well, maybe younger engineers that are excited to solve those same problems that you were just talking about.

How do you get that buy-in from them to be like, "We're a part of this?"

The way I would define what does LFG mean for us is at Raft, you live your authentic self. That crosses age groups. It's not about the young and senior and mature individual. It's about if you want to feel free, and you want to work towards the biggest and the hardest problems, Raft is the place where the only thing matters is the outcome.

Raft is the place where we surge around the problem set, and get so excited about it, and get to the outcome as fast as we can. Our why and everything we do is around that. I think the biggest thing that differentiates us from everybody in the GovTech sector is our why is driven by solving hard data problems, surging around the problem set, and having so much fun and freedom doing so.

Jenn was going to Raft Wu-Tang clan as part of that question, but I had to tell her no one wanted to hear that. That culture, it's hard to maintain a culture like that as a business grows in scale. I assume that when Raft was essentially a startup, you're able to touch and influence many different parts of the organization. As a CEO with leadership styles and principles in an organization that grows, a lot harder to proliferate that culture throughout the organization. How have you effectively done that as the company has expanded?

You know what? I think it's not that hard. I think it's rather easy. When you wake up, and you live your true self every single day, and when people join you for that reason, they are also connected from the same cloth. Talking about Wu-Tang, you know why I love Wu-Tang? You love them or you hate them. You can't ignore them. Everybody here at Raft that's what they love about, and that's why they join it.

Explain to us the background behind the name. How did you come up with that?

I wish I could take all the credit, but we had a pool going on who came up with the best names, but of course, we're nerds. Raft algorithm is the foundational algorithm to Kubernetes. Raft algorithm is a better way to do consensus than Paxos. The name is GovTech, Raft was a better way to do and embark on this solving hard data problem journey than anything out there, and hence Raft. We joke about it's a life Raft that's going to get you in the other side, but it truly is a better way to do consensus algorithm.

I love that. Let's focus on the leadership and how you've grown the organization. How has your leadership evolved from startup to where we are today? Has your growth strategy changed from that?

In the beginning, there was a lot of multi-hats that you wear. I was the coach, the QB, the kicker, the wide receiver, you name it, I was doing all of that. My role has transitioned to being primarily the coach or the organization.

Honestly, making a lot of mistakes and going down dead ends and making some poor decisions on hiring the wrong people, recognizing early that and running towards fear with a lot of courage and making those hard decisions, "This is not it. We got to pivot." All those things, I think, has transformed, and being very real with ourselves of, "Are we going to do this the hard way, or we are going to make decisions here that you make out of fear?" We've always been honest with that. Sometimes, those have been very hard decisions in the moment, but they have paid out in the long term.

What keeps you up at night as the CEO of Raft?

Changing the way we fight, defending the nation in the given new geopolitical landscape is a very hard problem to solve. For me, I came to this country for a very specific reason. I wanted to have a better life for myself and for my generations ahead.

Everything I do at Raft is about how do I make sure everybody who is an extended and few degrees of separations, and the entire purview of my existence, and my kids, and my neighbor's kids, and my neighbor's neighbor's kids, how do we make sure this is the country that no matter where you are in the entire world, you look up to, and you say, "There's a light at the end of the tunnel." I really hope with everything we are doing, we are marching towards that mission.

We've spent a lot of time here in the interview thus far talking about culture and maybe the softer side of the company, but let's get to some of the hard problems that you're trying to solve. How does Raft differentiate in what can be described as a very crowded market across what I'll broadly call advanced technology serving mission-focused customers?

The market is definitely crowded, but you'll be surprised to see how limited companies exist where products actually work. They all have great marketing brochures, great advertisements, "Look, it works." But if it doesn't help the operator in the field to make a decision quicker, it doesn't work. It's as simple as that. It's that binary.

How do you ensure that quality, though, within Raft to put software products in the field that do work for the operator?

Two ways. First thing is you got to be tight with them at the hip. Cannot make a product in a silo, cannot make a product with synthetic data, cannot make a product that operator is an afterthought. There's a lot of buzz around Dual-Tech. We learned this super early, if you don't have real data, don't even worry about it. Who cares? That's a big misnomer. I think with Raft, we've always used data to build products and operational data, and now it does two things.

It builds trust within the operator. You really understand my problem. You're not just using some commercially available data that doesn't make any sense and telling me, "It will magically work on this end." The other thing is also all of these problem sets are hidden behind different security classifications. If you can't play in that space with novel solutions, it's not going to work. I think both of those things we have been able to do differently are reps on that, our flywheel on that had made us distinguish so much that we are competing with ourselves.

That's really interesting. Obviously, you brought up data a couple of times in that response, and with the enormous amount of data that's coming from, as you mentioned, commercially available sources or from proprietary sources within your government and users, how does Raft ensure that you have the best available data to answer the problem that the customer is putting in front of you?

Being tied to the hip with the operator really helps. Nobody understands data as well as they do because that's what they've been working on for ages. What our tool does, it's to give them that level of clarity to interface and interact with the raw data so much more. When they circle something, they can, using the low-code/no-code solution, pull that into the core of the platform and use it to make decisions.

You recently took Growth Capital from Washington Harbour Partners. What does that investment enable for Raft?

Two things. Investment in our suite of products. There are Raft data platform which is the heart of our AI capability. The investment from WHP has really enabled us to continue investing in how do you scale Raft data platform across the operational command and control sets. What Raft data platform has enabled for mission sets is faster decision-making. For example, if we were working with Space Force customers, and their operators had to wait months for combining fusing, transforming this commercial data with classified data.

Through the Raft data platform being used in one of the organizations within Space Force, the operators themselves are able to do billions of transformations per day, which took them months to do. That's been game-changing for them. Now we are working with them to scale that to all the guardians out there such that this is a capability that's in their own hands through the power of Raft data platform. More of the investment is going towards a lot of R&D and product building.

The second thing is broad partnerships beyond the GovCon ecosystem with different companies, with different organizations that has been very, very helpful and successful for us.

That's amazing. Tell us, what's one piece of advice that you'd give your former self, younger Shubhi, or any other entrepreneur that wants to be like you? Saying that in another way, what's the one thing you feel our audience should know if someone wanted to start a GovTech federal contracting firm?

The one piece of advice that I would give the earlier version of myself is to love fear, and know that that separates the ones from the ones who make it and the ones who don't.

I like that. That's good.

As we progress toward the end of our time together today, I'd like to pivot toward life lessons that may be additive to our audience. What's one lesson your career has taught you that you think everyone should learn at some point?

I'll go back to what I just said, run towards fear with a lot of courage, compete with yourself, and don't get distracted.

We end all of our interviews with what we think is the most imperative question that we ask, and what's the most important thing that we should know about Shubhi other than you like to run towards fear?

That is it.

No, that's your being, that's you.

I'm a little concerned about the response because I'm not a roller coaster guy, but my family, we just went to Disney World, and they all went on the roller coasters. Was I supposed to run towards the front of the line?

Yes. You should be in the front row-

I'm terrifying.

-hands up.

If you're going to get on the roller coaster, front row is the only way. What's the point?

There you go.

What's the point?

That's our clip right there.

I love that.

We really appreciate you joining us here today, Shubhi, and for all your insights, and congratulations on the great success that you've had at Raft.

Awesome. Super nice. Great conversation. Great question. Thank you both.

Thank you.

Special thanks once again to Shubhi Mishra, CEO of Raft, for joining us on this edition of Beyond Strategy an ACG National Capital Region Podcast. Jenn, I really like the fact that Shubhi kept going back to that core principle of embracing fear, running towards fear. I brought up at the end my fear of roller coasters, and she said, "You got to hop on the roller coaster and go in the front row. That's the only way to do it." Which seems to embody what she's doing at Raft.

I know. Her LFG gets them going, I guess. She definitely loves to run towards fear. What I took away from this is make yourself be in those uncomfortable positions, and that helps you learn and lead better.

Hopefully, for all you dedicated listeners out there, you've missed us over the last 8 months or so, we promise now with my ACG presidential duties off to Morgan Higgins, that we'll be a little bit more committed to the podcast here in 2025. We already know coming up next is going to be a sit down interview with the team over at Amentum.

Yes, we are back.

We are back.

LFG we're back.

Subscribe wherever you get your podcast from. Thank you once again for joining us on ACG National Capital Regions, Beyond Strategy. For Jenn Wappaus, I am Andy McEnroe, we'll talk to you next time.