Luckey: Improving DoD 1% saves lives unlike incremental consumer app work
Palmer Luckey · 20VC: Anduril Founder, Palmer Luckey: "I Am Here To Build a $50Bn Company", How Palmer Evaluates His Relationship To Money Pre & Post Oculus' $2.3Bn Exit & Why The US DOD Needs To Be More Like China in It's Approach · Sep 28, 2020 · at 44:09
Palmer Luckey contrasts the mission and societal impact of working in defense technology versus consumer social media applications.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.0s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“You're not going to make the world very different if you make Snapchat one percent better. But if you can make the United States Department of Defense one percent better, you are going to save a lot of lives. You are going to save a lot of money.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Palmer Luckey
Luckey: Time-and-materials contracts force defense primes to discard past work
“In the defense space, because of the way the incentives work, where most contractors are paid kind of on a time and materials basis, they're incentivized to do the same work over and over again. They're basically incentivized to throw away everything they've d…”
Luckey: Over 90% of Silicon Valley supports the U.S. military
“I would bet that upwards of 90% of Silicon Valley is very supportive of the military, and the perception that it's not is a symptom of another problem, which is that a very small group of radicals have managed to hijack the narrative and convince everyone that…”
Luckey: China is far better at large-scale manufacturing than the U.S.
“If China wanted to have a good blue water Navy, they would be kicking our butts. They are so much better at building things at large scale quickly than we are.”
Luckey: Defense startups cannot build multi-billion dollar scale as subcontractors
“You can't just be a subcontractor to a prime and expect to build A multi-billion dollar company.”
Palmer Luckey: SpaceX and Palantir Were Defense's Only Recent Unicorns
“And when I looked at national security, it was a very interesting space where the only two unicorns in the last 30 years in defense, Palantir and SpaceX, were both founded by people who had just sold their company for billions of dollars.”