The Ledger
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Schimpf: Anduril found virtually no American-born tier-one manufacturing executives
“Looking for a great head of manufacturing. There's basically no like tier one execs we could find that were American born. We ended up finding someone who was from Canada, but everyone I found who was like great thinking about this differently, like really nov…”
Anduril is partnering with OpenAI on counter-drone defense systems
“This is one of the areas we're partnering with OpenAI on”
Defense startups willing to build weapons are the most likely to succeed
“A lot of the areas that You know, are going to succeed are often the ones that are less popular. It's areas working on weapons. Like, this is not an area that a lot of companies are interested in doing, but I think to succeed in the defense space, you have to …”
Brose: Modern great power conflicts will be long wars of attrition
“This is a war of mass and attrition and production. These are not going to be short wars. They're going to be long wars.”
Brose: Defense companies shouldn't rely on government for technical solutions
“I will always be interested in the government's definition of its problems but I'm not going to necessarily believe that they know what the right solution to that problem is.”
Schimpf: Anduril doesn't need government procurement reform to succeed
“Do I think it's necessary to change for us to be successful? Not really. Like, we're just going to play the game that they present.”
Defense manufacturing capacity constraints will be eliminated within five years
“So our belief is this is a solvable problem. You could take advantage of commercial innovation on this, and there should be no capacity constraints you know, over any sort of five-year period to actually be able to produce these systems.”
Luckey: Early VCs rejected Anduril due to moral objections to defense tech
“Many early investors actually turned us down, because while they believed that we had a good team, good people, good technology, good product market fit, they thought that it was inherently wrong to build tools capable of being used for violence.”
Brian Schimpf: AI enables military deployment of 100,000 autonomous systems
“AI kind of broadly gets you this ability to scale up to 100,000 of systems Being able to do a much, much higher volume of activity that's much harder to defeat, it's much harder to counter and you can conduct, you know, warfare in a much more precise and large…”
Bry: Tech firms should bear R&D risk while military buys products
“I think Andrew in particular has done a nice job of trying to sort of like advocate for this new model where companies should be taking product development risk and the government should be focused on, on, on just buying the best product, which is, is difficul…”
McIntosh: SpaceX and Anduril vertically integrate by necessity, not strategy
“In many ways, they're vertically integrating by necessity, not strategy. There just isn't an ecosystem of companies that can scale with them.”
Brose: Anduril's primary five-year goal is manufacturing defense systems at scale
“The next five years, I think looked like a couple of things. I mean, one is production at scale, right? So we've had to kind of like fight our way out of earth's atmosphere on a lot of programs. Where we're now in a position on large contracts where we have to…”
Schimpf: Autonomous military tech acts as a stabilizing strategic deterrent
“Has a significant kind of stabilizing impact and a turn impact on It just is harder to use force to get your political ends.”
Schimpf: Selling to the Pentagon is only 30% harder than commercial sales
“Is it much worse than selling to a bank or an oil and gas company? It's like, I don't know, maybe like, 30% worse, but like, probably not five X worse.”
Schimpf: Defense budget allocates under 0.2% to modern autonomous systems
“The amount of money that's actually spent on capabilities like the types of things we're working on is somewhere like between .1 and .2% of the defense budget.”
Schimpf: Anduril skips proprietary AI model research to leverage commercial models
“We don't do AI model research. We don't need to. We just take the best things that are there.”
Schimpf: Anduril uses bathtub manufacturing techniques for cruise missile fuselages
“And we made the exterior fleet fuselage in this process that you use for making acrylic bathtubs. It's this hot press process.”
Schimpf: Commercial supply chains are the only solution for weapons volume
“And I think on the weapons production side, look, the only solve out of this is to actually tap into the commercial and industrial supply chains that exist.”
Schimpf: Traditional defense industry technology is outdated, slow, and lacks competition
“The tech is old. It is not moving fast. It is very lethargic. There are relatively few competitors at this point.”
Defense tech will not produce hundreds of major startup success stories
“I think the hard reality with this is it's just like venture. It's just like any sort of industry where there isn't going to be 500 success stories. That is unlikely to be the case, right?”
Anduril fielded its first weapon system in under two years
“It was just like under two years from when we started from Never having done a weapons program to having a fielded weapon capability”
Boyle: Belief that big government tech businesses cannot be built is false
“They were very wary of companies that had to go through the long procurement cycle to work with government, and so there was sort of this meme in Silicon Valley that you can't build a big government business, and if we've seen anything over the last 10 years t…”
Schimpf: Recruiting hardware and manufacturing talent to California is extremely difficult
“Particularly as you get to more hardware skill sets, manufacturing skill sets, getting them to come to California is a huge problem.”
Boyle: Anduril wouldn't exist without Oculus and Palmer Luckey's gaming obsession
“Because Andrel would not have happened if not for Oculus. Oculus would not have happened if not for Palmer's obsession with gaming, right?”
Brose: Washington now expects defense tech startups to solve military problems
“The conversation in Washington has changed completely around the types of companies that can do this work, and frankly, now the expectation that we need them to do this work.”
Brose: Anduril's move into weapons production was the original plan
“Much of what we said we wanted to do are things that we're now doing. We just never would have believed that we would be capable of doing them on the timeline that we're now doing them on. But the sort of movement into all domain autonomous systems the movemen…”
Sankar: Anduril and defense startups build on Palantir Warp Speed
“Andrel has built their production infrastructure entirely on top, or manufacturing production infrastructure entirely on top of our offering here. Shield AI, Epirus, Sail Drone, Sironic,”
Schimpf: Anduril depended on a strict 2-to-3-year window for success
“I don't think we could have done it five years or later would be too late. Five years earlier probably would have been too early. I think we were in this like two to three year window where we could ride all those waves correctly.”
Schimpf: Defense Innovation Succeeds Only When DoD Bets Big on Startups
“I think if we are in a position where we're working on top tier defense programs at scale, I'll feel like we've started to move the needle. And we are actually making a dent in, you know, both how the department buys, but also the types of technology it's buyi…”
Lower costs allow the Air Force to fund multiple autonomous aircraft vendors
“Unlike, you know, something like an F-thirty-five, where it's only feasible to afford one provider of this you can start to look at for this, for weapon systems, for a variety of these things, Carrying multiple people to be able to really incentivize the indus…”
Defense startups fail by solving non-urgent problems for the DoD
“I think the single most important thing is if you're solving a critical warfighter need on a problem that, you know, urgently needs to be solved, you can be successful. I think the trap for most people is they're solving a problem that would be great to solve,…”
Anduril is working with the Air Force on the Loyal Wingman project
“Today, we're at a place where, you know, we're fortunate to be able to, you know, disclose we're working with the Air Force on the Loyal Wingman project, which is incredibly big change from where we were when we even started with this.”
Anduril's Palmer Luckey Funds Employee Side Projects to Attract Ambitious Talent
“One that I like is Andrew Palmer Luckey says that he offers his employees, tools and technology for all of their side projects, not just their work projects, because he thinks that'll attract ambitious people.”
Luckey: Non-defense sectors produced hundreds of unicorns while defense yielded two
“In that same thirty-year time period, there have been I think it's four mattress unicorns 12 fast casual dining unicorns, over 50 gaming unicorns, over a hundred social media and mobile application unicorns, over a hundred financial technology unicorns, over a…”
Power: Software engineers do not need hardware backgrounds for defense tech
“You don't need a hardware or manufacturing background to come into a business like Hadrian or SpaceX or Anduril to be able to, you know, be a competitive candidate or create value, you know, with your software skills.”
Brose: Anduril's early smaller products were stepping stones to larger systems
“And the smaller things that we were working on, you know, the stuff that fits in the lobby out here, they were great programs. You know, many of them are still phenomenal programs that are making a difference for warfighters. They're important to the business,…”
Brose: Anduril launched its space business through years of internal R&D
“Having the courage of our own convictions to put IRAD behind the things that we're looking to build. I mean, that's how a space business got started for us, right? I mean, it wasn't like we just magicked into a gigantic space program. I mean, it was years of i…”
Anduril liquid-cooled desktop GPUs for early solar-powered desert Sentry towers
“We were literally taking desktop GPUs GPUs and liquid cooling them to get these things to work in a hot desert under solar power.”
Anduril built Sentry prototype in three months and scaled in 2.5 years
“We were able to go and get a prototype up in about three months and then move into like a pilot in about six months and then a full scale in about two and a half years.”
Skydio and Anduril are training a new generation of full-stack engineers
“Companies like Skydio and Andrill and others are really taking on that mantle and training a new generation of full-stack engineers that are really comfortable and fluent across hardware and software.”
Veterans from SpaceX, Tesla, and Anduril are moving into maritime tech
“We're seeing people from a lot of the other American dynamism companies like SpaceX, Tesla, and Andrel, they're taking their learnings and experiences and bringing them over to the ocean.”
Startups are rebuilding maritime vessels from the ground up for autonomy
“There's companies like ARC, but also Ceronic, and Roll with their dive platform that are building new versions of vessels from the ground up with modern day assumptions on how should these vehicles operate in a digital world.”