We shouldn’t have learned the lessons the first time. When I was in sales at Palantir, we made a lot of mistakes.
What is an example?
So much. There’s this idea of focusing entirely on your product – and like Field of Dreams, you build it and they will come. So you go directly to the end user, the person in the field, and don’t worry too much about the authorizers and appropriators in Congress, agency management, or mid-level bureaucracies. At Palantir, we understand that you need to work with each of these audiences. Hiring lobbyists took us much longer than it should have. At Anduril, we did this in the first week.
There’s also this hilarious misconception that you have to subcontract to the big guys – Booz Allen Hamilton and Deloitte and all those guys – because somehow they’re going to get you into their contracts. This doesn’t work. And there is an idea that you should create an advisory board where a group of retired generals and retired civil servants can guide you through this process. The reality is that they haven’t been through it either.
When Anduril started, defense technology was abhorrent to many engineers. Is the stigma still there?
The days of easy money startups are over and geopolitical realities have set in. People look at what’s going on in Ukraine or Israel or the potential threat to Taiwan and say, “Man, I’d love to spend time working on things that will move the needle for humanity. This does not always look like protection, but involves more difficult technical issues. And you’re starting to see investors feel more comfortable taking risks that may have been beyond the pale in 2017.
You still get pushback from the left.
It’s not the left – it’s a very small minority of people on the fringes. In 2024 it is much more difficult to have reasoned, thoughtful opposition to defense technology than it was in 2017, and that has made it easier for us to communicate our mission and to recruit and retain engineers.
Anduril just raised $1.5 billion to help build what it calls a 5-million-square-foot “superscale” factory to produce thousands of relatively inexpensive autonomous weapons. is this necessary
During the later stages of the Cold War and beyond, the US turned to a strong posture with very expensive, sophisticated systems in small quantities. Things like fifth generation fighter jets, aircraft carriers and missiles that cost millions of dollars every time they are fired. This worked when we had a dominant lead and deterred a large-scale conflict. This is no longer the geopolitical landscape. In Ukraine, we are depleting entire stockpiles of weapons systems much faster than we can resume supplies. We need a supply chain that allows us to ramp up production of basic, low-cost systems so that if we ever get into a large-scale conflict, we can quickly push weapons to the front line and not run out of stockpiles.
