We didn’t have to learn lessons the first time. When I worked in sales at Palantir, we made a lot of mistakes.

What is an example?

Such. There’s this idea of ​​focusing entirely on your product – and like the Field of Dreams, you build it and they will come. So you go directly to the end user, the person on the ground, and don’t worry too much about authorizations and appropriates to Congress, agency leadership, or mid-level bureaucracy. At Palantir, we understood that we needed to work on each of these audiences. It took us much longer than expected to hire lobbyists. In Anduril we did it from the first week.

There’s also this hilarious misconception that you should subcontract with the prime contractors – Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte and all those guys – because one way or another they’re going to bring you in to their contracts. This doesn’t work. And there’s the idea that you should create an advisory board where a group of retired generals and retired government officials would guide you through this process. The reality is that they didn’t experience it either.

When Anduril started, defense technology was daunting to many engineers. Is the stigma still there?

The days of easy-money startups are over and geopolitical realities have emerged. People look at what’s happening in Ukraine or Israel, or the potential threat to Taiwan, and they say, “Man, I’d love to spend time working on things that are going to make a difference for humanity.” This doesn’t always feel like defense, but it involves more difficult technical issues. And you’re starting to see investors feel more comfortable taking risks that might have been inconceivable in 2017.

You are still suffering reprisals from the left.

It’s not the left, it’s a very small minority of marginalized people. It is much more difficult in 2024 to have reasoned, thoughtful opposition to defense technologies than it was in 2017, and this has made it easier for us to communicate our mission as well as recruit and retain engineers.

Anduril just raised $1.5 billion to help build what it calls a 5 million square foot “hyperscale” factory to make thousands of relatively inexpensive autonomous weapons. Is this necessary?

During the latter stages of the Cold War and thereafter, the United States adopted a force posture with sophisticated and very expensive systems in small quantities. Things like fifth generation fighter jets, aircraft carriers and missiles that cost millions of dollars each time they are fired. It worked when we had a dominant position and were able to deter large-scale conflict. This is no longer the geopolitical landscape. In Ukraine, we are depleting entire stockpiles of weapons systems far faster than we can replenish them. We need a supply chain that allows us to accelerate the manufacturing of basic systems at low cost, so that if we ever find ourselves in a full-scale conflict, we can quickly get weapons down the line head on and not exhaust our stocks.