Sam Witherspoon was a lawyer who walked away from a safe career to co-found a tech company. The first thing he built? A platform for selling divorces online. He was ashamed to tell people what he did for a living. So he sat in a boardroom with his co-founders and asked a dangerous question: what if we burned it all down and started over?
That question launched a 12-year grind into one of the most guarded industries on Earth — Canadian defense intelligence. Today, Anvil's software runs on active military operations. Their unofficial company patch is a cockroach. The motto: Hard to Kill. In this episode, Sam shares how a team of 30 competes against billion-dollar American defense contractors, why Canada's sovereignty moment is opening doors that didn't exist two years ago, and what it really takes to outlast giants when you can't outspend them.
Samuel Witherspoon
Sam Witherspoon is the Co-Founder and CEO of Anvil (formerly IMRSV Data Labs), an Ottawa-based defense intelligence platform that accelerates mission-critical decision-making for the Canadian Armed Forces and allied defense organizations. An engineer and lawyer by training, Sam clerked at the Federal Court of Canada before co-founding the company with Bennett Brown in 2013. What started as a two-person consultancy has grown into a team of 30+ engineers, data scientists, and former military analysts whose software is deployed on active military operations. Sam is a member of the Council of Canadian Innovators and an advocate for sovereign defense technology in Canada.
