David Julian has quite the resume. Once an engineer at NASA—more specifically, a communication systems engineer—and signal specialist in the mobile phone division at Qualcomm, he now serves as the enthusiastic CTO of San Diego startup Netradyne. We were curious how Julian has navigated the tech startup world, so spent an hour parsing his inspiration, his strategy, and his vision for new technologies—most notably artificial intelligence (AI). He also offers budding tech entrepreneurs some sage advice as they launch in the sea of 2018 tech innovation.