# Justin Lopas Co-founder and COO of [[Base Power]]. A mechanical engineer who worked at [[SpaceX]] — on Falcon 9 and Starship — and then at [[Anduril]] before co-founding the company with [[Zach Dell]] in 2023. Lopas is a small but clean data point for a pattern the vault has been building out: the defense-tech operator diaspora. SpaceX and Anduril are now senior-talent sources the way earlier cycles had PayPal and Google, and their alumni are carrying a specific operating style — vertically integrated manufacturing, hardware iteration speed, regulatory confrontation — into adjacent capital-intensive sectors. Base Power applies it to residential batteries and grid services. See [[Base Power $1B Series D]] for the round that scaled it. > Status: stub — expand if Lopas becomes a political-money actor or if the defense-tech-alumni pipeline gets its own concept page. ## See Also - [[Base Power]] - [[Zach Dell]] - [[SpaceX]] - [[Anduril]]