Well, you know that I'm Sam and Jack's little brother, right?
When we started Anduril in 2017 as kind of the pariah of Silicon Valley, people will think about us as like a hardware company, but the core of everything that we do is actually software.
Our interview with Alex Karp when we were walking around the office of Palantir.
He's got to keep moving, right? Got to keep moving. Can't sit down.
Once you mentioned that, I've been thinking that the whole time. I'm like, I don't know if I even feel comfortable in this chair. Three of the co-founders were from Palantir and then a bunch of our early team were from places like Tesla and SpaceX where there was already a lot of government intersect. From day one in Anduril we were starting from where Palantir was in year 10. Defense as a sector is multi-domain and so you have things under the sea, things on the surface of the sea, ground vehicles, aerial vehicles and space. The Anduril strategy is we want to cover the whole gamut. The most annoying lesson I've learned from Peter Thiel is that he's always right when he talks. You need to take it very seriously.
Trae Stephens,
Good to be here. How's it going?
Thanks for having me at Anduril.
It's a much cooler place than most places in Silicon Valley.
No, it's really cool. I remember I was meeting with David Yulovich like a couple years ago and we were talking about another hard tech defense tech company down here. I'm not going to name names but I was really excited about it and he was like that's not cool. You need to go to Anduril. And now that I'm here I'm like okay I yeah I get it.
Although to be fair this weekend you did interview Dan Wright from Armada in front of an F-17A which is pretty cool as well.
It's pretty cool. Yeah, we don't have an F-17 here, but we do have a lot of other cool stuff.
Close, right? Pretty close. Pretty close.
You're building the future F-17s.
That's right. We've got the Fury, although you can't really see it. It's just downstairs. But yeah.
Well, it's great. I talked to a couple people in preparation for this. Dan Wright being one of them, Moritz, Eric from Altimeter, Jack Altman, who you were just on his podcast, and
Well, you know that I'm Sam and Jack's little brother, right?
No, I'm not. I'm just joking.
I was like, okay. It could be a cousin.
Could be. You never know.
I'm going to have to actually look through their family lineage. So, you recently just had Pete Hegseth here. We just got back from the Reagan National Defense Forum. I want to know what is the current state of the defense wave and where are we in the technology of war?
Yeah, I mean there's a lot going on in defense tech these days, which is kind of crazy thinking back to when we started Anduril in 2017 as kind of the pariah of Silicon Valley. It was not something people were doing. It was incredibly unpopular and now all of a sudden there's almost nothing as popular. Maybe AI slop enterprise SaaS companies are slightly more popular but defense tech is right up there. So I think there's a tremendous opportunity given the cultural waves shifting inside of the department where they're really interested in engaging with innovative companies and I had the unique privilege of being there at the very beginning and kind of shepherding that wave to where we are today.
And what was that like having Pete Hegseth here?
I mean, it's fun. Secretary Hegseth is incredibly charismatic. He understands the problems that are going on right now and he really gets where Anduril fits into that equation. So, not only the secretary, but also his entire senior leadership was here. Being able to interact with Under Secretary Duffy, Under Secretary Michael, the general counsel, it was a really cool opportunity not only for Anduril's founders, but also the entire team who got to interact with him during that day as well.
It's exciting. So I want to talk about the origin of Anduril. I hear there's some story about 007 that you're very close with that I need to hear more about.
Yeah. So I was a senior in high school when 9/11 happened and ended up going to college specifically trying to go into the intelligence community. So after four years at Georgetown, I got a job in the IC and had this expectation that I was going to show up and somebody was going to throw me the keys to an Aston Martin and I was going to have a watch with laser beams. Instead I sat in a cubicle in a windowless concrete basement with two other people who didn't work, they just sat around and talked about sports all the time. So my James Bond dream was completely untrue. Then about two and a half years in, I bailed and went to Palantir. It was the first time that I had exposure to really crazy visionary people who wanted to change the way that we were doing things inside the defense intelligence national security apparatus. So it's kind of cool now being in a position where, if you saw Top Gun Maverick, the bad guy general says, 'You're a dinosaur, Tom Cruise. The future is autonomy.' And it's like, 'Wow, they're actually talking about Anduril.' It's a full circle moment.
In the midst of all of this, there's obviously a lot of excitement. There's increased competition on the private side. Public side has its own bottlenecks. I'm curious where do you think defense tech stands for the competitive state?
Defense as a sector is multi-domain and so you have things under the sea, things on the surface of the sea, ground vehicles, aerial vehicles and space. All of those domains are critical for the Department of Defense to have dominance in. The Anduril strategy is to go multi-domain. We don't have a niche approach to delivering autonomy or attritability in any single domain. We want to cover the whole gamut. This is the way that traditionally defense companies have done work, like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman. We believe that there's a lot of shared autonomy components that can cut across all of those domains that give us an interesting competitive advantage. In Silicon Valley, even companies are being started that are attacking each of those layers as well. We welcome the competition. We think it's really great to have more companies in the space that are moving away from the semi-communist centrally planned economy way that the department has been doing business for the last 30 plus years.
I recently had Bradley Tusk on the podcast and he's all about the regulatory environment and political advisement. He thinks that the recent investments in private sector companies from the government is somewhat of a communist strategy. Do you think that? What do you think about the investments in Intel and MP Materials from the government standpoint?
