Clay Tippins: From Weak Lungs to Warrior Entrepreneur [ZEROED IN]

A self-proclaimed Southern boy with a Conservative Baptist upbringing, Clay Tippins had a set of sick lungs that would pile up school absences and nearly cause him to repeat the first grade. That was until his doctor said, “Put him in a pool.”

Likely a case of undiagnosed ADD, instead of Adderall Tippins found relief through application — in the pool, staring at a black line upward of four hours a day until the sport itself got him into Stanford University. What followed were years as an elite operator in the United States Naval Special Warfare Command, a career in Silicon Valley, a run at Georgia governor, and going into business for himself as both a consulting firm and gun company owner, helping develop a modular rifle meant to disrupt the market and facilitate how military operators train.

But the story really begins with family values, roots in Georgia, and an indelible truth for Tippins: If there’s a hard job that needs doing, you do it yourself.

RECOIL: You grew up poor, as you’ve said, but came to value things that are hard to kill or break — a tractor that’s never quit, for example, passed down for a couple generations. Can you share more?

Clay Tippins: I think you call my upbringing very traditionally Southern, religious, lower middle class, and I thought my granddad hung the moon.

One of my favorite stories that shaped me when I was growing up was when he was a plumber, a union guy. This was during the time when the economy was bad, stagflation, you know, Nixon. His crew was tasked with digging a ditch and putting in a pipe, and he said, “No, we can't do that.”

The guys who had dug the ditch didn't slope the walls enough. It was too deep relative the slope on the walls. Someone was going to get in there, and he knew the walls were going to collapse and someone would get buried alive.

The site manager said, “Well that's your problem to figure out because you either have to get in there and lay the pipe, or we'll just get rid of your crew and get another one in here.”

My grandfather picked his best friend, and the guy he disliked in his crew. My grandfather said, “I'm going in there to dig the pipe because when this thing collapses and buries someone alive, I want it to be me.”

That's exactly what happened. It buried him alive. The only thing above the ground were his two fingers. He wiggled them as well as he could for a while. Eventually, he passed out and quit wiggling his fingers.

So his best friend said, “Well that's it, Max is dead,” but the other guy who didn't like him, who was as stubborn as he was, basically said, “If there's anybody that's as stubborn-son-of-a-bitch enough to live through this, it’s Max Hudspeth. I'm digging him out.”

They got him out. His legs were crushed, ribs broken, punctured lung, but he lived through it. I don't remember at what age as a kid I heard that story, but it became part of my values and DNA really early.

If there's a hard or dangerous job to be done, you do that, and you don't ask anyone else to do it for you.

RECOIL: How early did you start swimming?

CT: I was a really sick kid; I had pneumonia for what seemed like every year, multiple times a year. At one point, they thought I had cystic fibrosis.

Finally, the pediatrician told my parents, in first grade, after I had missed a month of school — they were going to keep me back — he said, “Look, your kid's got weak lungs. We can treat stuff forever, but you guys need to get him in a year-round cardiovascular sport.”

There just weren't that many options back then, so they put me in swimming, and it turns out I kind of had a God-given talent for it.

I was probably one of these ADD kids. We didn't know what ADD was, but it was really good that I was put in the water to look at a black line two to four hours a day.

So, it just turned out the one thing they put me in I had a natural gift and orientation for. That’s what got me into Stanford, what paid for Stanford. I would not have been able to pay for it had it not been for swimming.

RECOIL: Swimming, around first grade. At what age did your dad or grandfather introduce you to shooting?

CT: The happiest times I had, especially with my dad, were in the woods. So, I just grew up loving shooting, loving hunting. At a young age I had a .22 and a fishing rod, and I would put them in my backpack and just go exploring, hunting, fishing, all day long.

RECOIL: What did you major in at Stanford? 

CT: I took a bunch of classes in political science, public policy, and economics. I thought I was going to law school. But I tried to major in the stuff that: a) I liked, and b) I thought were the easiest courses because I wanted to have a high GPA.

RECOIL: How did the transition to the Navy come about? 

CT: I thought I'd be in the military briefly when I was in high school, because I was in eighth or ninth grade when Top Gun came out. I remember reading my first article on these dudes in the Navy that no one had ever heard of, in like 1986, called Navy SEALs. It's not like I decided for sure to do that at that point, but the seed was planted. I thought about enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1991, when the whole Persian Gulf War went down, but my dad said, “Look, you got plenty of time to be in the military later. Go to college.”

When I got to college, I took a class in the role of the military with Condoleezza Rice as the professor, and I ended up liking some of those classes. She ended up being sort of an informal coach and adviser to me.

Then, another mentor: My swim coach at Stanford was an ex-Marine sniper in Vietnam. We always knew we were about to get our asses kicked in practice when he'd walk down the pool deck with Carlos “Charlie” Hathcock’s book ear tagged. 

You knew that he was going to read a passage and say, “Guys, the moral of the story is to get your head in the right place. And don't consider your limitations when you don't know what you're capable of. Now get in the water.” 

My coach at Stanford didn't know a damn thing about swimming. He had never swam a competitive stroke in his life. 

He got back from Vietnam, and he went to Long Beach State and got his degree. I think he was like a lifeguard or something. And he was watching the swim team practice. He started hanging out with the swim coach. That guy kind of took him under his wing, and that is how my swim coach became a swim coach — not because he understood swimming, but because he understood humans. He understood a team, he understood performance, he understood pressure, he understood work ethic, he understood attention to detail.

He was awful to me at first. He recruited me — and I was a very highly recruited swimmer — but I had been sort of a Baptist mama's boy. I was the perfect wind-up doll. You tell me what the rules are. What's expected of me. I would do it to a T.

When I got to Stanford, he refused to tell me what to do. I said, “Hey, coach, what are you wanting me to do today?” He would scream back: “Who do you think I am? If I have to tell you what to do, you're hopeless.” 

He refused to coach me or give me direction as a way to force me to grow up. There were times when I hated the guy, but my wife will tell you that if it hadn't been for Skip Kenney, she would have never married me. He really had a lot to do with me becoming a man.

He had a lot to do with me wanting to be in the military. I was under the authority every day of somebody who literally hunted men in the jungles and islands of Vietnam in 1965 and 1966. He loved teams. He loved America.

He would talk about what that meant for the rest of your life. What it meant when you interact with your team — to understand what is possible, because you've seen what is necessary. He probably eventually forgave me for going into the SEAL Teams instead of the Marines.

RECOIL: When did you graduate from Stanford?

CT: I got out of Stanford in 1995. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I thought about becoming a minister. I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship to study Divinity. I got partway through that process. I ultimately wasn't smart enough, I guess, to get a Rhodes Scholarship.

And then I started trying to figure out what it takes to apply to go to BUD/S and be a SEAL. And I realized that's what I wanted to do. 

This was during Clinton’s military drawdown. There weren't that many slots. It was a really long application process. It took me a while to get in.

I was training the whole time. I started working. I was hanging out in Atlanta. And that's when I met my wife. My goal at that point was to, you know, play the field until I was at least 30. But when you meet the love of your life at a bar on a Friday night, when you're 23 — all of a sudden, your plans change.

So I fell in love. And I dropped an application to a law school. I honestly didn't know if I was going to get in, but I did get into BUD/S. That sort of accelerated the pace of the conversation with this girl. It went from, “She's pretty cool and pretty awesome but where's this going?” Because I'm going out to San Diego to go to be a SEAL. Like, are we doing this together or by ourselves? That was in 1996. 

RECOIL: Was she in for the ride? 

CT: Yeah. I'll give you an example to answer that story. The first class I went through, I broke my leg the Friday before Hell Week. My class went through Hell Week, and I was on crutches, 

handing out Gatorades and candy bars and stuff like that to like my classmates in the middle of the night during Hell Week. She went with me and helped.  Literally, she was low crawling on the beach in jeans and pearls to help my buddies. 

I had to restart day one of BUD/S again. So we get to Hell Week, and on Thursday night, we're doing “around the world.” Which is when you paddle around Coronado Island at zero o'clock in the morning or whatever. You're hallucinating. Everybody's tired.

We’re paddling, and we get down to wherever it was, you know, Imperial Beach down there, or whatever. It was 4 o'clock in the morning. All these boats are kind of coming into the landings. Some of these guys are eating candy bars and drinking Gatorade.

I asked, “Where the hell did you get that?” Because it was not given to them by the instructors.

And one of these guys said, “Well, we were just paddling down the middle of the San Diego Bay, and this mermaid comes out of the water and throws Gatorade and Ziploc bags of candy bars in the boat.”

And the other guys said, “Dumbass, that's not a mermaid. That's Mr. Tippins’ wife.”

She had gone and gotten a pair of fins and a wetsuit with one of the other girlfriends or wives of one of my classmates. She was waiting, watching for the boats to come down the middle of the San Diego Bay since 2 o'clock in the morning.

And she follows all these little boats that have chem lights on them. She swam out in the middle of the bay. And she was aiming for the first boat. She assumed I was going to try to be out front. She aimed bad because we were going too fast. So she only caught like the last boat crew or two, which is called the Smurf Crew.

She was incredibly supportive. You'd be surprised how many guys go to BUD/S and don't really know how to swim but wanted to be Team guys. Because we both had been swimmers, we would spend some of our weekends teaching these guys to swim so they could pass the water exercises. There are guys today who will say, “I wouldn't be a SEAL if Tippins’ wife hadn't taught me how to tread water.” 

RECOIL: Did you propose before BUD/S?

CT: I got my letter, or someone called me and told me, “Hey, you're going to get an invite to BUD/S.”

And up to that point in my life, I'd been pretty consumed with the opportunity cost of any relationship. What if I meet someone hotter? What if I want to go do something else? And that person doesn't want to do it. A very nice and good point of view, right?

And we were on a trip somewhere and it just hit me all of a sudden: No matter where I went, no matter what I did, I wanted to do it with her. Another person was now part of me, not just me by myself. I guess this is what being in love means.

I turned to her and said, “I just figured something out and it's something important. And since it's going to impact the rest of your life, I felt like I should tell you first and I shouldn't sit on it.”

And she says, “What?”

I said, “You're going to spend the rest of your life with me.”

And she starts laughing and she's like, “So what are you going to do? Just like clock me over the head with a club and drag me back to your den?”

I'm like, “If necessary. Look, suddenly I know what I want. I know how the story ends, and I want to do whatever it takes to have that happen.” And we joke that that was my marriage proposal.

I got to BUD/S and convinced one of the instructors into letting me out of training early one Friday afternoon. It was the week before BUD/S started. 

She picked me up at 4:45 that Friday afternoon because we didn't think we were going to have a chance to get married. I rushed outside still wearing my training uniform. I'm wet, sandy. No time for a shower. I jump in the car.

She brought me a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I changed on the drive. She's speeding to the San Diego courthouse. And we get there and they say, “I'm sorry. You didn't make it on time.”

It's 5:05, but I said, “No, you don't understand. We're getting married today.”

We got the justice of peace to keep the shop open for an extra 10 minutes. We got married. It was after that when I broke my leg, and I had two or three months off before I got recycled through training. We were able to go to church and do a God ceremony and all that.

RECOIL: When did you get out of the SEALs?

CT: I got out in 2000. I was out for 10 years, and I started my business career. I worked in Silicon Valley. I had a bunch of buddies from Stanford who were in tech, so when I got out, I went back to Silicon Valley, worked in tech for a couple of years. After 9-11, like everybody else, we thought, “Why are we here? What's our goals?” For us, that was being back South, having a family, being close to family.

So, we moved back in 2002. I continued working in tech for a number of years. Then, we were driving back one day from a vacation together in 2008 or 2009. She was talking about a cousin of hers who had gone to West Point, who had served in the Army for like 20 years, and he'd gotten out.

She said, “He got called back to active duty.” I laughed and I said, “No, he didn't.” She asked, “What do you mean?”

I said, “That's not what happened. He felt guilty because he hadn’t done his part. He probably called everybody he had ever served with, saying, ‘What can I do?’”

And her head snapped around, she goes, “You're not talking about him. You're talking about you.”

And I said, “Well, no I wasn't, but if you're asking if a day doesn’t go by that I don't feel guilty — there’s not. I feel guilty every day.”

She said, “I’m sure I will hate myself at some point for saying this, but maybe you need to figure out what to do about that.”

So, I looked around. They had set up reserve SEAL teams. I went back into Reserves in 2010, and I stayed in for a number of years.

RECOIL: How do you reconcile this feeling of guilt, needing to go back, with raising a family at home?

CT: I've got friends who are warrior monks. One of our best friends who I served with is in his 60s. And he served in the shadows for four-plus decades, His life is us … America. My family and I are probably as close to family as he has.

If I had two or three or four lives to live, l might be a coach in one. The life I've chosen is probably what my first one was supposed to be. But, for one of my lives, I would probably have stayed in.

But I tell people all the time, “It's really, really hard to serve in special operations or in the intelligence community for 20 or 30 years and have a completely normal, healthy, functioning, unimpacted relationship with your spouse and your kids.”

And if you're gone and you can't talk about what you're doing, and you come back and you're a changed person, then that leaves a mark. And I have experienced some of that, but nothing like the guys that deploy 8, 10, 12, 14, 15 times.

It's a spectrum of hard sh*t. I did things for God and country that mattered, and I'm proud of that. But I did so little, and I've given so little and sacrificed so little, compared to others.

So if you're asking is that compatible, can you have a great marriage and great kids and a great career and serve your country at the highest level for a long time? It's really hard to do all that.

RECOIL: Georgia governor — what made you decide to go that route? 

CT: I was scared about what's going on in our country. I was visiting a particular buddy of mine who serves our government at a pretty high level, is pretty aware of what's going on. We were just grabbing beers. It was 2017. This was early in Trump's first term. And I said, “All I know is what I read in the newspaper, but what in the hell is going on in D.C.?”

He said, “You hear all this talk about coups, all this other stuff. Yeah, all this stuff's real.”

He told me all these things, and I started trembling. I was so angry, and it was bigger than Hillary versus Trump. Maybe I was incredibly naive. But I still wanted to believe I lived in a country that was special, under a system that works.

I flew home and I told Lori, “I can't unsee what I've seen and unhear what I've heard.”

I realized D.C. and the nation is a really big problem set. So I just kind of downscoped and thought, I care about my state. I love my state.

So, I started talking to people. I went and talked to two or three business guys who really weren't politicians, but I asked them if they’d run for office — guys who would go outside the mold, and no one wanted to do it.

Everyone said, “That's crazy talk, but you seem really passionate about it. Maybe you're called to do it.”

RECOIL: It wasn't even you, initially?

CT: No, no, I went and sat down with three different people. And all were wealthier, more experienced, and more successful than me and I said, “I want you to run for governor. I'll give you money. I'll raise money for you. I'll do anything I can.”

But I realized, eventually, I was called to run. I never lied to myself about having a great chance of winning, or had a great chance to win. I hate losing. I think I would have been a great governor. But I was very aware of the fact that I was jumping in without money, without any brand name, without a support base — really late in the game.

I could not have told you at the time why I was called to do it. I think in hindsight, I found my purpose in all of that, but at the time I did not know what my purpose was.

RECOIL: You think you'd do it again? 

CT: I don't know. There hasn't been a minute since then I felt called to be in politics, but I wasn't sitting around wanting to be in politics before I was called the first time. So, if I feel like God calls me again, I try to listen to things when I'm called, but I have no reason to believe that that will come again.

RECOIL: Kind of sounds like your grandfather’s pipe story. You don't know when it's going to need digging. But who is going to jump in and get it done? 

CT: These things shape. I'm probably incredibly unrealistic and old-fashioned with my values, and I’m stubborn, but it's who I am and how I was raised. It's how I want to live and die.

RECOIL: What made you want to decide to buy a gun company? 

CT: After I lost the race for the Republican primary, I had come into knowledge that one of the other candidates — the person who was the odds-on favorite to become the Republican nominee and become governor — had done some things that certainly weren't ethical and some argued they were possibly a violation of finance laws and those sorts of things. What he'd done was wrong.

And the long story short is I exposed him for that. He went from being the odds-on-favorite to be governor to losing by a country mile.

I made a lot of enemies through that because I exposed him. A ton of people were deeply financially invested in his campaign. Everybody says they love the do-whatever-it-takes-to-get-the-job-done, get-the-mission-accomplished sort of guy, until they see the tough, ugly things being done to stop evil.

One of the promises I made my wife was, “Well, if I lose, I'll just go back to the big tech world.”

I assumed because I'd done well with that, everybody'd just be dying to have me back and take me back with open arms. But I had burned some bridges and the village a little bit by exposing this guy. I had been in a bunch of newspapers and national news. And the fact that I had come out as a conservative, God, gun guy …

RECOIL: Yeah, big tech is not really a friendly environment for … 

CT: I was shocked. A lot of the doors that were always the first I could walk through were closed in my face. So, I thought, “Well, I'm in my mid-to-late 40s, just trying to figure out what the hell I'm going to do for a living.”

I'd always wanted to be an entrepreneur, talked about it. I never would have done it because I'd been afraid to take the risk — you know, “golden handcuffs.” I got paid well enough that I would never have taken the risk. But I'd always been one of those guys talking about why I could do it better than everybody else.

But all of a sudden when you don't have a job, you become more risk tolerant … So I did two things, I started a consulting firm and then I was sitting at deer camp in 2018 or 2019 when Nate Treadaway, my brother-in-law, who, at the time, was the CEO of Bergara, asked, “What are you going to do?” Which is code for: “How are you going to be able to take care of my sister?”

I said, “Well, I can't find a job so I got to start my own company. Also, I have a couple guys who approached me, offering to invest a little bit of money, if I found a company I wanted to buy.”

I said, “I'm passionate about good jobs in small towns. I'm intrigued by the idea of finding a manufacturing business or something like that in a small town.”

He snaps his finger and goes, “You should buy a gun company.”

He said, “There's a lot of them for sale. I see most of them because I'm a CEO in the industry. There's a lot of value in some of them. You don't know sh*t about running a gun company, but you understand guns. I could help put pieces around you.”

So I started looking into Lone Wolf and realized the guy who founded the company was looking to retire and turn the company over. So I put together a small group and bought Lone Wolf.

And I was doing consulting at the time for a client in Boise. So one of my trips through Boise, I stopped at the PWS factory because I owned one of their ARs. And I met the founders, and I just started talking to them and I realized they wanted to sell. And so we eventually bought that business as well.

This was during the Trump term, beginning of 2020. You see what happens when society breaks down with all the chaos and anarchy. It went from a love of guns and a love for shooting, to being mission critical for our way of life.

So, running a gun business really became not just a financial thing, but an extension for me of what I'm passionate about, and what I believe in as a core value system. 

RECOIL: So, based on the values plus your military understanding of guns, are there ways that you applied that to PWS and Lone Wolf initially? Over time?

CT: Yeah, I'd say probably that most of the good ideas didn't come from me, by the way, which is a pretty consistent thing in my life. But for one of our big bets, I’ll tell you the inception story.

I had spent some time in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, and I saw how Ukraine was desperate to get out of that Warsaw Pact weapons ecosystem and get on the NATO weapons ecosystem.

There are warehouses full of 762×39 ammo and AK-47s, and all they want to do is shoot 5.56 to 7.62, and be like the NATO American guys they’re training with.

One day, I was with a Ukrainian soldier with a fully automatic weapon. He had his finger inside the trigger well, and the safety was off. I get in the car, and it’s like the scene from Pulp Fiction. I'm about to be the dude who gets his head blown off, and I'm like, “Whoa, buddy, get your finger outside the trigger well and let's put that thing on safe.”

It really reinforced to me how the thousands and thousands upon thousands of repetitions and rounds that the Tier-One, Tier-Two American SOCOM dude gets on a weapons system — that developing the right habits is NOT how the rest of the world works. And you put these other guys, who have not had a lot of training, in a high-pressure situation, and they don't perform well. It's not safe.

The best way to perform well and be safe is developing muscle memory on your weapon. When you got these different weapons systems — you got your CQC weapon, your main battle rifle, DMR, whatever. With American operators, you can have five different guns, and you get tens of thousands of rounds, and you develop good muscle memory. 

But that's not how it works with the dudes whom we're supplying and fighting with all over the world. It’s not what they have.

So, I started thinking, “What could you get out of a gun that had one set of controls?  Could you shoot multiple calibers, handle multiple mission profiles and have it be jack-ass proof for a normal guy out in the field?” I came back and I said to my engineers, “I have an idea. What if …”

They said, “Yeah, you're way behind. We had the same thought while you're gone, and we actually started working on it already.”

And that was really the inception story for the UXR. I understood it in my soul. I have seen with my own eyes why a weapon like this is necessary and can matter, and how it could save countries money. In fact, we're working on really doubling down on it.

RECOIL: Are you looking into contracts with any agencies?

CT: Those efforts are underway. Most weapons systems that come out, the bigger, the bolder they are, the more likely it is going to have a 1.0 and a 2.0 version, right? One of the goals that we set for ourselves is: We didn't want to launch the weapon until we felt like it was great, until we had multiple calibers.

We always knew that there would be follow-on versions, and additional calibers to be launched. When you're dialing in a weapon — take gas, for an example. Or take the springs or take the bolt travel, pace, length, all those other sorts of things. You can get a lot of variance in a single caliber based on barrel length and whether the weapon is suppressed or not. Well, you start talking about barrel length of all types — 7 or 9 inches on up to 18 across all these different calibers …

RECOIL: Buffer weights. Buffer springs.

CT: Well, if you change the spring weight for a 7.62, does that spring still operate with 5.56 or .300 Blackout? Of variables that you have to test and change, one has to be re-verified across all.

We made a decision to price at a sub-$3,000 price point to the customer because we want people to be able to afford this, because we want to get them into an ecosystem where they're getting the third caliber, the fourth caliber, the fifth caliber.

And so, we basically launched with 5.56, .300 Blackout, and 7.62 NATO, and we've had a controlled amount of volume available in the market across different calibers, but we also wanted feedback from the market on follow-on features and additional calibers. 

Then, calibers like 6 ARC, .338 ARC, and 8.6 Blackout came out. A government entity asked us to look at doing a release in 7.62×39 with a short barrel configuration. All of these calibers are in upcoming releases, but we didn’t make hard decisions on that roadmap when we started designing the rifle initially in the summer of 2022.

RECOIL: Talk about engineering hours, testing — how many hours went into this rifle?

CT: Yeah, it's tens of thousands, upon tens of thousands of rounds.

Testing it took a long time and a lot of investment, and we had to have the conviction to stay the course. But I took it to some buddies, guys who I really respected who were 20- to 30-, 40-year operators. I asked, “Am I biased, or is this thing something special?”

They basically said, “Dude, if you can pull this off, it's a disruptive, generational weapon.” 

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