The Next Era of Warfare is Here
Episode publishedPodcast: Prof G MarketsProf G Markets
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Welcome to the ProfG Markets Founder Series. I'm Ed Elson. For decades, the defense industry was dominated by a small group of legacy companies like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. They built the aircraft, missiles, and weapons systems that defined American defense. And for years, Silicon Valley largely stayed away. That is starting to change. A new generation of defense startups is challenging those incumbents, competing for Pentagon contracts with a software first approach and building AI powered systems designed for modern warfare. And their systems are being used today on ba
Thanks for having me on.
So you are the CEO and the cofounder of what I think people would agree is one of the more controversial startups in America. I eventually wanna get to how you think about Andrew's role in national security, in geopolitics and technology. But before we do that, let's just rewind the clock to June 2017. You and a handful of, founders, including Palmer Lucky, who people may know as the founder of Oculus. You have an idea for a defense tech company. Tell us the origin story of Andra.
So several of the cofounders, so Matt Graham, Trey Stevens, we'd been longtime friends and had worked together for quite some time. And then Trey had left to go do investing, working at Founders Fund, looking for a defense company to invest in. And at the time, right, this was twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, nobody was touching defense in Silicon Valley. And so we we've been talking for years about doing this idea of, you know, bringing the best in Silicon Valley technology to the Pentagon. And, you know, it it seemed like a, you know, something that was, you know, some massive opportunity, ma
Why did you guys wanna do it? Why did you guys wanna go to that place that many investors and technology founders didn't want to go to?
So I'd spent probably about a decade working around the national security space, and when you big part of the motivation is when you meet these folks working on these problems, they are true believers in what they are doing. The mission is very very visceral to them, very real. And providing these, you know, soldiers, sailors, airmen with the right capabilities just felt like something that, you know, the idea of just not doing it and saying too bad, you know, like, you just get what you get. It just didn't make sense to me. And I think my other view of this has been, you know, the goal of the
I wanna get to that in a moment, but just thinking about those sort of those early years when you were just starting up. I mean, part of the big idea was we're gonna take the Silicon Valley ethos and the Silicon Valley culture, and we're gonna bring it to the national defense conversation. And I think that the on the one hand, the great thing about that is that this is where all of the futuristic thinking is happening. This is where the technology is being built. On the other hand, the criticism of Silicon Valley has been this move fast and break thi
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