(Full Episode) From Backup Dancer to Reindustrializing America | Kevin Damoa

Kevin Damoa did not plan to build a company. He planned to be Usher. Growing up Panamanian-American in LA, Kevin had a dance scholarship lined up. Then September 11 happened. He chose the Army instead. Two tours in Iraq. Thirteen years fighting wildfires with the National Guard. A career that ran through SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and Harley-Davidson. And underneath all of it, a problem he first noticed in the Iraqi desert in 2003: why is moving cargo between road and rail still done with chains and turnbuckles, by hand, in brutal heat, the same way it was done in 1950? Nobody had fixed it. So he built the fix. Glid is Kevin's answer: autonomous, electric vehicles that make it faster, cheaper, and safer to transfer cargo between road and rail. But the real story is bigger. There are 140,000 miles of freight rail across the United States, much of it dormant, running through communities that lost generational wealth when those lines went quiet. Kevin is not just building a logistics product. He is building a case for reindustrializing America, town by town. In this conversation, Kevin and Gary talk about calling, surrender, the mentors who shaped him, the loss of Josh Bear, what most founders get wrong in the early days, and why Kevin calls Glid his love note to logistics. Keep going. It gets better. 🎙️ Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube 🌐 Full playbook at www.50chairs.com 🔗 Learn more about Glid at glidtech.us