Carol Politi, and the Business of Time and Space

“As soon as someone starts, two months later, I wonder, ‘How did we ever survive without them?’” This is how Carol Politi describes her growing team. In fact, her company earned recognition from both the Washington Post and Washingtonian Magazine as a “Top Workplace” in 2025. Carol is the president and CEO of TRX Systems, a technology company specializing in the delivery of assured positioning, navigation, and timing (APNT) systems, selling primarily to the Department of Defense. Assured PNT offers a means, predominantly to the military but also to some commercial entities, of identifying location and time when options like GPS are denied or compromised. GPS is “being denied all over the globe . . . It’s really quite straightforward to deny commercial GPS.”

To be honest, I don’t think I knew that GPS was something that could be denied (though I probably should have). But it can be, both naturally and intentionally, Carol told me. GPS satellite signals can be blocked naturally by physical barriers such as tree canopies, buildings, etc.  It can also be intentionally denied through jamming attacks executed by foreign adversaries.

So, how does TRX get around that? “We fuse inputs from multiple satellite signals as well as inertial and environmental sensors together, so that if any one source of position or time is denied, we have other sources that we can leverage.”

THE OUTDOORS

So, did Carol grow up knowing she was going to lead a company that focused on fusing satellite signals and inertial sensors? Not even a little bit. “I was pretty much running around the woods building forts, catching snakes, and there was no pressure on academics or on life goals. I spent a lot of time running cross country. My parents sent me to good schools, but outside of that . . . there was not any pressure to excel in any way academically.” Carol and her three siblings were “kicked out of the house in the morning and told to come back for dinner.”

When I asked Carol if there were any strands from the tremendous amount of time she spent outdoors that translated to her professional work, she said that, actually, the development of TRX’s technology required a lot of time outdoors. “You can imagine when you’re trying to figure out if your product works, when GPS is denied . . . a lot of your test scenarios require walking for extended periods to determine performance under threat, etc. So, I will say it was related . . .” Although she doesn’t spend as much time immersed in that area of her business anymore, “our test team logs the miles they walk, and it’s not a small number.” Plus, these test locations can be “in pretty rugged areas, so it’s good to be comfortable in those environments. So maybe that outdoor experience early on helped.”

THE INDOORS

Carol’s parents may not have pressured her to excel academically, but she did excel, especially in math. It stood to reason that engineering would be a good fit. She had what she describes as only “a very high-level idea of what engineering was [when she started college].” At first, she was drawn to mechanical engineering, but soon found that electrical engineering suited her better.

The application of her training, however, has varied. “For about half of my career, I’ve supported defense. For the other half, I was involved with satellite, internet, and cellular technologies.” In its nascent years, TRX’s product was not focused on military requirements or applications. Rather, it was designed for a completely different use case: “to deliver indoor positioning systems for firefighters.”  Like many young companies, TRX pivoted. Carol explains that it became clear there was a strong need in an adjacent market space, as GPS was increasingly contested outdoors.

THE ENGINEERING OF A BUSINESS OUTLOOK

Throughout the arc of Carol’s professional life, her point of view about work has changed, as well. “I guess I’ve become interested in a much broader array of business items and challenges than I was when I started. I was an engineer when I started, and I was very focused on only the technical challenges. Now I’m much more focused on the broad perspective: what does it take to succeed as a business, grow a team, and all those aspects are quite interesting to me.”

This didn’t just apply to business type, but to business size, as well. “Over the course of my career, I’ve found that there is a lot to like in both small and big companies. I like small, agile companies and the challenge of building something new. But I also like steering . . . big ships and find that really interesting. I’ve always felt it’s possible to find challenges in a wide variety of environments . . .”

When I asked her about what she thought made a good sales leader, she said, “There are a lot of different leadership types, and I think very different people can be good leaders.” Among the qualities she emphasized were “that you really prioritize the team as being the important thing in building a company and that you prioritize delivering paths for interesting work and achievable growth, and provide equitable compensation.” In a sense, Carol’s trajectory has been built on a chain of transitions. “It’s really been a navigation from electrical engineering into higher-level product development and the sales/marketing/business-development side of the house.” Preceded, of course, by forts and snakes.

You can learn more about Carol here. Be sure to congratulate her while you’re there!