Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Grant Demaree was a junior US Army officer watching military planners pass around Word docs and PowerPoints during the 2014 Ebola crisis when he realized something: the military’s most critical decisions were being made with outdated tools and slow, legacy workflows.
That insight led him to build Onebrief—a platform now used by military headquarters worldwide to dramatically accelerate their planning. But to get there, he had to figure out how to get the military to actually buy software.
Grant sat down with YC's Brad Flora to share how they did things that don’t scale to get their first users, closed their first deal with a government credit card, and turned an offline, Navy-approved laptop into a $650M company helping military teams make faster, smarter decisions.
Learn more about Onebrief: onebrief.com
Apply to Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch: ycombinator.com/apply
Grant Demaree was a junior US Army officer watching military planners pass around Word docs and PowerPoints during the 2014 Ebola crisis when he realized something: the military’s most critical decisions were being made with outdated tools and slow, legacy workflows.
That insight led him to build Onebrief—a platform now used by military headquarters worldwide to dramatically accelerate their planning. But to get there, he had to figure out how to get the military to actually buy software.
Grant sat down with YC's Brad Flora to share how they did things that don’t scale to get their first users, closed their first deal with a government credit card, and turned an offline, Navy-approved laptop into a $650M company helping military teams make faster, smarter decisions.
Learn more about Onebrief: onebrief.com
Apply to Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch: ycombinator.com/apply
