Lead Track: Breakout 2 | 11:30 a.m.
The Saturday Morning Coffee Test: Finding Your Next Mission as a Leader
At the 18-year mark of his Army career, two years short of retirement, Yakulis left the military for a new form of service: founding Vector, a Modern Warfare as a Service company that trains and equips U.S. and allied forces with the next generation of unmanned systems.
The decision was guided by a framework he now shares with every leader who asks him how to find their next move. He calls it the “Saturday Morning Coffee Test”: Pay close attention to what you read, study and think about in your unstructured time. The articles you return to and the problems you keep working through are reliable indicators of where your strongest contribution lies.
What Yakulis encountered on the other side reshaped his understanding of leadership itself. In uniform, an entire institution recruits, trains, compensates and assigns the people a leader is responsible for. In the corporate world, almost none of that infrastructure exists. The CEO sets the strategy, builds the team and personally carries the weight of every livelihood the company supports. The military, he argues, makes leadership structurally easier than most people realize until they leave it.
In this session, Yakulis shares the lessons drawn from that transition: why passion is a more durable compass than prestige, why ego is the quiet obstacle in most reinventions, and why the leaders who navigate change best are the ones who began exploring long before circumstances required it. This is a direct, practical conversation for executives leading well today and considering what they are being called to lead next.
About Andy
Andy Yakulis is CEO and co-founder of Vector, the nation’s Modern Warfare as a Service provider. A seasoned leader with 18 years of service as an Army officer and special operations commander, Yakulis has built a career at the intersection of defense technology, innovation and private investment, bridging advanced solutions with U.S. national security needs.
Throughout his military career, Yakulis led tactical combat operations and worked to integrate cutting-edge technology into the Department of Defense. He also collaborated with private capital to drive investments in defense technology. As a pilot-in-command and air mission commander, he holds the Federal Aviation Administration’s highest commercial aviation rating, the Helicopter Airline Transport Pilot certification, with extensive experience piloting both military and civilian aircraft.
Yakulis earned a Master of Science in management as a Sloan Fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, focusing on technology innovation and venture capital. He also co-founded the health tech startup Medeloop.ai, scaling operations to secure initial customers and raise millions in venture funding. Additionally, he holds a Master of Arts in defense and strategic studies from the Naval War College, where he represented the U.S. Army in an elite international officer program.
A graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point with a Bachelor of Science in geospatial information science, Yakulis was a Division I lacrosse athlete and four-year varsity letterman.