Hoplynk

Most people don't think about "networks". They open a laptop, click a Wi-Fi name, and expect life to work. When it doesn't, they hop to another WiFi network, maybe toggle a hotspot, swear a little, and try again. The burden sits on the human. Pick the right network. Pray it works. Guess again when it fails. Keep juggling.

In the military we have a concept for this: PACE Plans (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency Plans). It's how you design communications so that when the primary path dies, the message still gets through. On your laptop's network drop-down, you're staring at your PACE plan. The problem is, you're the one doing the planning and execution in real time. The plan is to switch to another network—the problem is you don't know if it will even work when you do.

I've lived that problem more times than I can count. "We're on our own base, so why can't we get online?" While supporting early efforts in the Ukraine War, I watched units struggle to stand up reliable connectivity, even on a U.S. base we'd had for decades. We weren't in some far-flung valley; we were in a place that should have been easy. And still, the same pattern: latency spikes, dead spots, ad-hoc fixes, and a parade of "try this other option". After twenty years of uncontested network dominance in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were still fighting the same reliability demons. The lesson hit hard: it's not a hardware shortage, it's an architecture and orchestration problem. We have links. We don't have a brain that treats them like one resilient system. Solutions that sorta-kinda do this are pricey and require you to be an IT networking professional. It's hard enough to do, and even harder to find the talent to do it when you need it.

The road warrior phase (and all the dropped calls)

After I left the Marines, I worked everywhere but an office: airport gates, hotels, cafés, back seats of cars. If you've ever tried to lead a critical video call with three bars of hotel Wi-Fi, you know the feeling. One too many dropped calls turned irritation into anger. Why am I still the one babysitting networks? Why can't the connection adapt around me the way cruise control adapts to traffic? What else should I buy in addition to Starlink?

Deadhorse, Alaska

The moment that broke it open for me happened north of nowhere. My vehicle died outside Deadhorse, just about twenty-two miles from the Arctic Ocean. I had thousands of dollars of comms gear: Starlink, an Iridium sat phone, an Inmarsat sat phone, and a cell phone. I had options—and no way to get a call out. Each device was married to a single network. Each one demanded I decide, minute-to-minute, which path might work. I didn't want to be a switchboard operator in the snow; I wanted a system that chose for me and got the call out by any means necessary. Primary. Alternate. Contingency. Emergency. Automatically. Staring at that pile of hardware, the idea stopped being abstract. We didn't need another "faster" link. We needed something to drive all of them.

From interviews to a company

Back in California, I met Althea and Charlie in a Stanford course called Hacking for Defense. We started doing what the class pushes you to do: shut up and listen. We talked to hundreds of people—operators, IT leads, first responders, field engineers, folks running drones and robots and remote sites. The stories rhymed:

The links exist, but you're forced to pick one.
Failover happens after failure.
Tools flood you with charts when what you really want is for the connection to just...work.

By the time we finished those interviews, we had the conviction that the world needed Hoplynk. We made the decision.

What we're building (in plain English)

Hoplynk is the continuously learning, continuously improving autopilot for connectivity. We watch every available path (cellular, fiber, radio, Wi-Fi, satcom) and continuously decide how to get your traffic through with the least drama. Sometimes that means bonding multiple links. Sometimes it's steering around a noisy channel. Sometimes it's preemptively jumping before a link collapses so you never feel the bump. You don't toggle anything ; you don't think about it. You just connect once, and it does the math for you, every second. This isn't about dashboards for the sake of dashboards. It's about making the next packet a good one.

What we believe

Operator last. The network should do the work; the user should not.
Field first. If it doesn't survive a dusty truck bed, a stormy roof, or a jamming-prone edge, we didn't build it right.
Simple beats clever. Deterministic, observable decisions win over magic tricks you can't explain.
Tell the truth early. When it breaks, we say so, fix it, and publish what we learned.

Why now

Everything critical is moving to the edge: autonomy, sensors, tele-ops, disaster response, remote work that isn't "remote" so much as "moving". The old model of picking one network and praying doesn't scale. Resilience has to be the default, not the upgrade. PACE has to be automatic, so handled by software, not a checklist you run in your head.

An open invitation

We started Hoplynk because I never want to watch a mission stall or a stranded driver fail to place a call because a human had to guess which network might work this minute. If that resonates with you, if uptime under pressure is your job, sign up. We'll bring a kit, plug it in, and see how it handles your worst day.

Other articles

woman in blue long sleeve shirt sitting beside man in blue dress shirt

Company

Oct 24, 2025

Candor, Humility, Initiative

Hoplynk was born out of a near-death Northern Alaska experience. Our last blog article explains why we exist. I want to talk about what it means to build Hoplynk.

At the Naval Academy and in the Marine Corps, we lived and breathed core values – honor, courage, commitment. After taking off the uniform, I was among the first employees at a hyper-growth startup. There, we decided our mantra was “low ego, high output, no bullshit.” Some organizations treat core values like marketing slogans. High-performing organizations use them as lighthouses to guide them. I believe core values define how you work, communicate, and live.

Culture Is the System

Values start as operating rules. They guide what we do when we’re tired, under pressure, or missing data. Hoplynk’s values are:

Candor – Say the hard thing kindly, early, and with evidence. Speak up during decisions.
Humility – Strong opinions, loosely held. Change your mind with facts. Teach and learn in the open; celebrate team wins over heroics.
Initiative – Run toward the smoke. Own problems end-to-end. Ship in small, safe steps with clear, observable outcomes.

Simple. Clear. Habits we expect everyone on the team to embody, and leaders to demonstrate in every interaction. If someone asks “What’s the culture here?” the answer must match what people see.

Ben Horowitz wrote a fantastic book called What You Do Is Who You Are, effectively summarizing the core task of leadership in a few sentences:

“Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.”

What Building Hoplynk Means

It means first principles engineering. We treat every problem as a greenfield opportunity to reimagine the way we approach networking.

It means skill and ingenuity over experience and pedigree. We don’t care where you came from, we care what you’re willing to do in pursuit of the mission.

It means simple experimentation. We’re trying new things every day. Sometimes duct tape is good enough. And if that works, then we can invest the time to engineer something better.

It means operator first. Don’t walk a mile in your users’ shoes, run a marathon in them. Our job is to make the system shoulder the cognitive load so humans focus on the mission, not the modem.

We accept reality: links will degrade, radios will die, environments change. Our job is to adapt. With patience, passion, persistence, and perseverance, we’re building autonomy into the backbone. Candor, Humility, Initiative. We don’t want people who wait for permission. Do the work where your results speak for themselves. Don’t polish for show. Deliver for impact.

The Vision: Always Connected

Fully autonomous networking to ensure persistent communications in any environment. That’s the mission. Connectivity is no longer a technical problem. It’s increasingly a critical requirement to exist. When running operations in a dead zone or piloting autonomous systems where downtime isn’t an option, you need performance. And performance starts with the people building it and how they work together.

Networks pre-empt link failures, stitching together whatever is available to deliver maximum throughput, security, and resilience. In the next year, we’re trying to deliver the same output as 5 companies’ working for 3 years. We can only do that by being efficient, intellectually honest, and dedicated. Ben Horowitz captures the truth here:

“What you believe means nearly nothing. What you do is who you are.”

That’s exactly how we see Hoplynk. One culture, one mission.

If This Resonates

We’re still early. We’re still building. We’re still learning. If any part of this feels familiar—if the “everything went dark” moment hit you, or you’re someone who believes low ego + high output is the only way to move fast, we’d love to get to know you better.

Always Connected. — Andrew

Company

Oct 24, 2025

Candor, Humility, Initiative

Hoplynk was born out of a near-death Northern Alaska experience. Our last blog article explains why we exist. I want to talk about what it means to build Hoplynk.

Culture Is the System

Values start as operating rules. They guide what we do when we’re tired, under pressure, or missing data. Hoplynk’s values are:

Candor – Say the hard thing kindly, early, and with evidence. Speak up during decisions.
Humility – Strong opinions, loosely held. Change your mind with facts. Teach and learn in the open; celebrate team wins over heroics.
Initiative – Run toward the smoke. Own problems end-to-end. Ship in small, safe steps with clear, observable outcomes.

Ben Horowitz wrote a fantastic book called What You Do Is Who You Are, effectively summarizing the core task of leadership in a few sentences:

“Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.”

What Building Hoplynk Means

It means first principles engineering. We treat every problem as a greenfield opportunity to reimagine the way we approach networking.

It means skill and ingenuity over experience and pedigree. We don’t care where you came from, we care what you’re willing to do in pursuit of the mission.

It means simple experimentation. We’re trying new things every day. Sometimes duct tape is good enough. And if that works, then we can invest the time to engineer something better.

It means operator first. Don’t walk a mile in your users’ shoes, run a marathon in them. Our job is to make the system shoulder the cognitive load so humans focus on the mission, not the modem.

The Vision: Always Connected

“What you believe means nearly nothing. What you do is who you are.”

That’s exactly how we see Hoplynk. One culture, one mission.

If This Resonates

Always Connected. — Andrew

Company

Oct 24, 2025

Candor, Humility, Initiative

Hoplynk was born out of a near-death Northern Alaska experience. Our last blog article explains why we exist. I want to talk about what it means to build Hoplynk.

Culture Is the System

Values start as operating rules. They guide what we do when we’re tired, under pressure, or missing data. Hoplynk’s values are:

Candor – Say the hard thing kindly, early, and with evidence. Speak up during decisions.
Humility – Strong opinions, loosely held. Change your mind with facts. Teach and learn in the open; celebrate team wins over heroics.
Initiative – Run toward the smoke. Own problems end-to-end. Ship in small, safe steps with clear, observable outcomes.

Ben Horowitz wrote a fantastic book called What You Do Is Who You Are, effectively summarizing the core task of leadership in a few sentences:

“Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.”

What Building Hoplynk Means

It means first principles engineering. We treat every problem as a greenfield opportunity to reimagine the way we approach networking.

It means skill and ingenuity over experience and pedigree. We don’t care where you came from, we care what you’re willing to do in pursuit of the mission.

It means simple experimentation. We’re trying new things every day. Sometimes duct tape is good enough. And if that works, then we can invest the time to engineer something better.

It means operator first. Don’t walk a mile in your users’ shoes, run a marathon in them. Our job is to make the system shoulder the cognitive load so humans focus on the mission, not the modem.

The Vision: Always Connected