The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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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.”
Luckey: Anduril's end goal is building a fully vertically integrated defense giant
“That is the end goal. Like in the end, I want to build products that make all of my other products more valuable.”
Palmer Luckey: Defense primes spend only 1-3% of revenue on R&D
“Like a typical defense contractor will spend between one and three percent of their revenue on IRAD. Whereas a modern tech company is going to be spending 20 to 50 to even 80% of their revenue on IRAD.”
Luckey: Government-funded R&D prevents building cutting-edge tech
“If you're reliant on the government paying you to do work, it means you're only ever going to build things that the government and that politicians already believe are possible. And if you do that, you're never going to be able to build the things that are tru…”
Palmer Luckey: Believe customers understand problems, not solutions
“Well, yeah, I think that one of our internal mantras is always believe that the customer understands what their problem is. Never believe that the customer understands what the best solution is.”
Luckey: Government moves fast on proven tech, slow on R&D
“I guess the point is the government is very bad at funding cutting edge new R&D because you haven't proved that it will work to them yet. And they're not in the business of risking taxpayer money on crazy science fair projects. But if you show up with a real t…”
Luckey: Most Anduril leadership and employees lean left politically
“The reality is that most of our leadership and honestly, most of the company actually leans more to the left.”
Luckey: Improving DoD 1% saves lives unlike incremental consumer app work
“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.”
Palmer Luckey: AI Is Not a Natural Outgrowth of VR or AR
“Artificial intelligence is not a natural outcropping of virtual reality or augmented reality.”
Luckey: Department of Defense Struggles to Procure Integrated Hardware-Software Systems
“It was going to be these kind of much smaller, much harder to make tightly integrated hardware and software systems that the Department of Defense is traditionally pretty bad at procuring.”
Luckey: DoD mistakenly measures innovation by deal volume instead of deployment
“And I think that that's a big problem with DOD is they, in some of these innovation related programs, they are equating the number of deals that they do with success. When in reality, they need to be measuring how many of these programs go on to be real deploy…”
Palmer Luckey: Product Quality Alone Cannot Win Defense Contracts
“You can't just win by having a good product in defense. You have to understand the legal side. You have to understand procurement. You have to understand procurement better than government procurement officers, because most of them aren't even aware of all the…”
Luckey: Anduril sells defense software continuously as a service, not annual licenses
“We don't sell somebody a software system and then sell them the new version a year later. Instead, we're basically continuously selling it to them usually as a service.”
Luckey: Hired sales reps cannot replicate the impact of a founder showing up
“Even if I have a sales guy who is better than me at selling, he'll never have quite the same impact as the founder of the company showing up. So sometimes you've got to show up because the customer wants the big man to show up.”