Hommels: Low-cost autonomous defense hardware destabilizes legacy military equipment
Klaus Hommels · Klaus Hommels: Why "Portfolios are Merely a Construct to Make LPs Happy"? | E1231 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Nov 27, 2024 · at 26:08
Klaus Hommels is the founder of Lakestar and Chairman of the NATO Innovation Fund. He highlights the extreme cost asymmetry favoring new defense technology over traditional military hardware.
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“You have a thousand euro drone that takes us a ten million tank. You have a 500,000 submarine, yeah, unmanned, which can take out a five hundred million The submarine, the classical one, and the same for basically every category.”
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“Even if you buy US fighter jets, Yeah. So the way how it works is you are the owner. It stands somewhere in the hangar, and you want to, you know, start flying. You have to put it in the way where, where you want to fly, and then this data is sent to the US, a…”
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“Yeah, currently we either we get a slot in a SpaceX, yeah, with all the with all the restrictions that there are, or we have Ariane, but Ariane base lastly sold a hundred percent of the defense transport capacity to Amazon. So basically, as Europeans, we are, …”
Klaus Hommels: Having one or two standout investments makes any portfolio successful
“I'm not so keen of building portfolios. If I find cool companies that make a difference, that is where the beef is. And if you have one or two of them, every portfolio looks great.”