Darren Farber - The Business of Defense - [Invest Like the Best, EP.417]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Transcript preview
Preview only
Something I speak about frequently on Invest Like the Best is the idea of life's work. A more fun way to think about it is that I'm looking for maniacs on a mission. This is the basis for our investment firm, Positive Sum, and it's the reason why I'm so enthusiastic about our presenting sponsor, Ramp. Not only are the founders, Kareem and Eric, life's work level founders, certainly maniacs on a mission, they have created a product that is effectively an unlock for founders and finance team to do more of their life's work by streamlining financial operations, saving everyone their most precious
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My
guest today is Darren Farber. Darren is the managing partner of Albion River, a private direct investment firm focused on acquiring companies that produce highly technical defense products and services. He is a former special adviser to the deputy undersecretary of defense, a former member of US Department of Defense task force for business and stability operation, and the list goes on and on. Darren is a wealth of knowledge in this space and someone I am grateful to have in The US corner. He shares his perspective on the changing role of The US in global defense and how recent conflicts have
at a very topical moment right now just by virtue of what appears to be this decoupling from this ultra long standing relationship that's existed since immediately after World War two, which is to say borders did not change in the Western world through force for the last eighty years. And we're seeing that paradigm change. And so that's a pretty big change, but I completely understand why we're going through it. And so let's say you and I have a contract. I'm gonna mow your lawn for the next eighty years, and you're never gonna pay me, or you're gonna pay me sporadically. So if you don't pay i
Maybe another perspective to offer. You spent a lot of time in the Pentagon. Mhmm. There's the, whatever, 870 annual defense budget. Talk about the shifting nature of that thing, that dollar amount that gets outlaid, what it's gone to historically that's been most important, how what is most important is shifting, and whether or not the Pentagon is good at keeping up with a shifting landscape in the way it spends its money. I
think a good frame for me to understand the building has been there are two parts. They're the front office and the back office. This is the best way to think about it in my mind. What's the front office? It's warfighting. That is lethality. It's projecting force. The back office is called the business mission area. It's everything except war fighting. And so in the business mission area, the ball has moved forward, but not nearly enough in terms of where it needs to go in terms of the general efficiency of how we run the back office of the building. And in the front office, we have very prist
What's, like, a quintessential example of that playing out, commercial to modified?
I mean, I I was part of a program in Afghanistan where we were trying to create handheld computing for the purposes of contracting officers being able to go outside the wire to be able to conduct commerce on the economy and do our counterinsurgency mission. So that's
Keep exploring with a free account.
A free account preserves the short preview. Upgrade to Pro for the full transcript and episode chat.