ANVIL is an Ottawa-based, 100% Canadian-owned defence technology company. Its platform links intelligence, operations, and planning. It structures mission-critical data and enriches it with AI to support military and national-security decision-making. Sam now projects that ANVIL will reach 600–700 employees, all in Canada, within the next two years. The company is completely bootstrapped.

Last month, I spoke with Sam at CANSEC about procurement, bootstrapping, and what new founders misunderstand about defence. This conversation goes deeper into the founder's journey of how he got here.

Sam wanted to become a historian, studied engineering, graduated during the Great Recession, and then entered law. He started ANVIL under a different name to build legal records-management software. The court wanted the product but had no budget or authority to run a pilot. A later pivot captured part of the family-law market and led to an investigation and litigation with the Law Society. Eventually, the team turned toward national security.

There were many points where Sam could have quit. ANVIL exists because he stayed persistent.

“It’s hard to hit a home run if you’re not at bat.” — Samuel Witherspoon

Fortune Favours the Bold.

Topics Discussed

00:00 - Cold open

00:45 - Introduction

01:29 - What ANVIL is and its thirteen-year path

02:42 - Finding purpose in defence and national security

04:44 - Childhood: history, war films, and engineering

09:18 - Entrepreneurship and Sam’s grandfather

13:49 - Graduating into the Great Recession and choosing law

17:49 - The Federal Court and first exposure to national security

19:40 - ANVIL’s first product

21:19 - The Law Society investigation and pivot

24:13 - Persistence and entering defence through services

26:02 - Escaping the services-to-product trap

29:36 - Early product contracts with PHAC and DND

31:41 - US SOCOM and operational deployment

33:01 - What Canada underestimates about itself

36:02 - Ottawa’s GovTech opportunity

38:33 - Canada’s inferiority complex

39:02 - Cities, housing, transit, and attracting talent

43:59 - ANVIL’s next chapter

45:40 - Projecting 600–700 Canadian employees

46:18 - Pray for peace, plan for war

47:43 - Resilience and taking another swing

Paul Ziadé is the co-founder and CEO of North Vector Dynamics, a Canadian air defence startup building precision, low-cost missiles to protect Canadian and allied skies. He is also the co-chair of the Alliance of Canadian Defence Companies, a new organization representing almost 200 Canadian-controlled defence companies committed to building sovereign capability. The mission is to industrialize deterrence.

“There’s no shortage of brains […] it’s the vertebral column that tends to be missing.” — David Ogilvy

It is time to start acting and stop waiting for permission. Fortune Favours the Bold.

Topics discussed

00:41 - Intro: What is North Vector Dynamics?

02:47 - The CM-70 SPEAR: Canada’s low-cost precision air-defence missile

05:48 - What “Industrializing Deterrence” means for Canada

08:17 - Domestic drone threats, ports, shipping containers, and critical infrastructure

10:18 - Who needs air defence beyond the military

12:05 - Why Canadian defence procurement has to change

17:10 - The Alliance of Canadian Defence Companies and Canadian-controlled defence firms

20:50 - Defence as industrial strategy, IP ownership, and Canadian wealth creation

21:41 - Paul’s path from childhood rocketry to engineering, academia, and entrepreneurship

24:05 - Why the corporate and academic paths were not enough

26:13 - Why North Vector Dynamics had to exist

27:19 - Raising capital for defence in Canada and why North Vector stayed here

31:13 - The need for Canadian risk capital and government-industry relationships

35:31 - NORAD modernization, Golden Dome, and Canada’s air-defence opportunity

37:18 - The future of North Vector Dynamics: missiles, hypersonics, sensors, and a Canadian neo-prime

39:44 - Interoperability and fitting into NATO-standard systems

40:19 - Advice for first-time founders: risk, comfort, and doing things without permission

43:43 - How Canada can make sure it follows through

45:30 - How Canada can start dreaming bigger

48:47 - Legacy, fatherhood, and showing younger builders what is possible in Canada

51:02 - Why defence is not a dirty word, and history is not over