Anduril Industries

“I think an area where, despite it being amazing for America and important for the world, I think the venture returns of the March might be tough will be defense, not because we don't need all these products, but because I think there's an element of that busin…”

“So Josh, co-founder and managing partner at Lux, which has done, basically did the contrarian thing, which has now become consensus around defense and deep tech and hard tech, and is kind of one of the men of the moment for things, calling things like Andrel, …”

“If you are building something like, we've talked about Andrel, it's sort of easy to talk about because it's such a perfect case study from the past, but we've talked about RAMP or General Matter, these, you need to build a movement of people to believe somethi…”

“And so that acts as a big heat sink, but we're still using, it's just a flat plate that's cut into a shape in two D versus having to be cast or CNC'd, which is just a lot cheaper for mass manufacturing.”

“The Andurl founding team are all so complimentary to each other and different, but respect each other so much and are good in different ways that Not any one of them, not any one of the four of them could have, like, pulled this off, but I do think that the co…”

“This is the amount of employee secondary. So this is people buying into Anduril, Anthropic, SpaceX, now represents 31% of all primary venture activity. Is buying into these secondaries in 20, 25.”

“You know, a metaphysical level, there's a really big difference between Andrel and like Anthropic, right? Those are like super different companies. And I think both of those could be good companies.”

“Anthropic and Anduril and SpaceX. These are phenomenal companies. They will be generation defining companies, and it is a good strategy to give money to ATVC and Founders Fund and Thrive to invest in these companies.”

“In their very first pitch deck, he said, we are going to make billions of dollars by saving the government tens of billions of dollars of revenue and of costs.”

“In their first pitch deck there, if I can remember all of them, they basically had five things, and they had all these weird ways to describe things like, you know, VR for war fighters and perimeter security on a stick and all these things that were, like, the…”

“Where the military, you know, where the military is trying to acquire things built to spec, the goal of Anduril is to acquire things built to mission, right, so they fund their own R&D, they put their own money up, rather than asking the government for R&D dol…”

“And like their first customer, if I remember correctly, it wasn't even the government. It was a private like ranch owner who wanted to monitor because there was like drug traffickers coming across his land.”

“And then a year ago Microsoft basically admitted defeat to some extent, and the government said, we're going to recompete the contract, and Anduril first as a potential partner to Microsoft, and then eventually took over a twenty-two billion dollar IVAS contra…”

“Their first product they ever built and prototyped was? It was called Century, but it wasn't the tower. It was a autonomous firefighting tank that would roll into a forest fire and could deploy, like, fire suppression”

“And now increasingly, what is most impressive is that what started as very much a sort of, like, product suite of adjacencies of, like, these are all things that will augment a lot of existing assets. We're now getting into potentially, like, asset replacement…”

“So like you look at, so Fury as an example, it's not only replacing in some cases, because there are some missions that we no longer need to send pilots into danger, we can do it autonomously, but there are some cases where you still want human judgment and sp…”

“Palmer says that Anduril has had products on the ground in Ukraine basically since day one. They were over there pretty quickly, you know, deploying assets and stuff like that.”

“Like several people are working on that, including Anduril, much to the surprise, I don't know if you have heard this story, but there was a story of Palmer talking about subterranean warfare, and the marketing person at Anduril was there, it was like, to the …”

“There's not going to be 30 new defense primes. There's probably going to be a very small handful of companies that can check all the boxes you need to be able to do that. Obviously, I think Android can be one of them, and there's maybe a few others”

“Anduril on day one got to start where Palantir was in year 10. Like, that, that level of experience and knowledge that is the kind of, like, specialty that they had and resonated with”

“People are under-appreciating a lot of the, like, second and third order effects from, like, a supply chain perspective around defense, because they're so focused on, well, who's gonna be the next andurl, and it's like, you can make a lot of money investing in…”

“Yeah, maybe less people will actually die because of their technology.”

“I think the thing that's most linked to stagnation is probably being a cost plus industry where there's very little incentive for progress, not much incentive to bring the cost structure down. And therefore you end up with this, like this fixed market size tha…”

“One of the things we're doing with Andrill right now is we're building out a five million square foot factory campus in Columbus, Ohio”

“Anderil, on the other hand, we're doing all of this as private R&D investment, and then we're selling the outcome, the output of that as a product.”

“What took Palantir, I guess, probably about five years to get to ten million annually in revenue, we did that in 22 months.”

“Fully autonomous weapons are not new. We've had autonomous systems in operation like CWIS, which is deployed on naval vessels. That shoots down aerial threats fully autonomously.”

“The most straightforward example is the deal we didn't do, we should have done, is the Andrewle Series A right, which was like, which was just, like, sort of obvious that it was gonna be special, and, you know, Palmer, we had worked with Palmer at Oculus, and …”

“There's kind of some magic in the fact that it's the same leadership team today as it was when we started the company.”

“There's too much hubris, I think, in the technology market that you know, as high tech people, we can do everything better than everybody else. I think that causes some companies to think they have an idea that isn't actually an idea because it already exists,…”

“I think there's in many cases an overestimation of addressable market, where like actually what ultimately they're going after is a very small sliver of a problem which Might materialize in a single large contract, but a single large contract is not an endurin…”

“Think about this as like a credit card limit. So the government has said up to twenty billion dollars they can spend on a class of Andurl's commercial technology. There's no obligated money”

“And actually one of our first major contracts was with US special forces for all of their counter UAS systems. That started as an as a service contract where they weren't buying hardware. They weren't buying software. They were literally buying a service that …”

“We should have moved into that seven years ago and been the first in it. We weren't big enough probably to really even understand it seven years ago, but like in hindsight, it was kind of obvious. You know, we'll, we'll probably try and play some catch up here…”

“We have 20 different P&Ls at the company all that are going after different parts of the defense apparatus that take a lot of these fundamental Technologies that we build and kind of piece them together in different ways.”

“All of these things can be characterized by Like a singular champion on the other side of the table that gets it, that believes in it, that wants to shepherd it. Actually you mentioned Shyam. He talks a lot about this kind of like heroism. Like it actually com…”

“The cruise missile we build, the actual airframe is built like you build a bathtub. And so we can take advantage of tons of contract manufacturers in the United States that can actually build a bathtub, right?”

“As a business, we run a sort of 40% plus gross margin across the board.”

“If you work in defense, and if you start a defense company, your moral compass tends to be pretty clear on this question, which is, we have a democratically elected set of governments that represent the US, the Alliance, NATO, all of the countries participatin…”

“Where I'm building missile systems that might only field in 2035, right?”

“We're one of the principal systems to defend against that threat in the Middle East.”

“There are lots of VC companies I would love to buy if I had an unlimited checkbook, but right now the multiples today are, they put it out of reach for us.”

“I think we're like, what? 10 or 14 X forward. Something like that.”

“It's a huge open hole, I think, in the market that is something we definitely would run at.”

“A lot of our competitors, the really big ones, if they make a mistake, They get paid to fix it. I think if we make a mistake, we lose money, and we lose contracts, so.”

“Still a couple of years out, but we're close. We're in the window.”

“So I mentioned we have 20 products and only about a quarter of those are in any kind of rate production and throwing money back to the business. Everything else is in low rate or development, meaning they're losing money.”

“So in defense, typically in a traditional Sort of product curve at seven to 10 years. We're doing it in three to five, which is kind of part of the magic of the company, and the thing we've become known, known for with our customers is, like, you're effectivel…”

“Roadrunner was, I think, 24 months from, like, a back of a napkin drawing to a fielded system.”

“So Roadrunner is a moderately sized air defense kinetic intercept system. And that's, you're over a hundred million easily before you're generating revenue.”

“We tried to early on build a pretty sophisticated aerial system. We didn't have the core building blocks. We didn't have the core team. I think we were twenty million or forty million in before we kind of realized that it was a scrap.”

“I believe that that is true in the long run. I also believe that we're not even close to where a lot of people think we are on it. Like I think we're still in the early days on, on tons of this tech. But as time goes to infinity, like absolutely every single m…”

“I do. Unequivocally. In defense, anything highly regulated, right? Every single thing is a headwind. And so the main thing you do to cut through headwind is you try and establish trust relationships with people who matter. I think Palmer is an N of one when it…”

“As a reminder, they have four or five, they only have four or five customers”

“They're basically saying, look, We've gone from trying you out in a lot of different areas to saying, okay, dammit, you're the dominant provider of this layer, so why don't we just systematize the contract? It kind of picks them as, it picks them as the clear …”

“Coinbase has sued their primary regulator and GovTech, SpaceX, Andrew Palantir all had to sue for various reasons. So it seems like it's actually more common than Silicon Valley conventional wisdom.”

“Founders Fund are closing in on six billion dollars of new funds. They invested the last 3.3 in 11 months in amazing businesses like SpaceX and Stripe and Anduril.”

“I mean, I like defense tech to it because I like guns and explosions. So yeah, I always like say how much I love and roll”

“We do have a really strong partnership with Anderil. And so we've been building the new kind of autonomous, attributable aircrafts.”

“We build the core aircrafts, and Andrel missionizes it, so think sensors or munitions, those kind of things.”