Defense Procurement
topic on 4 shows · 6 statements across 5 episodes
No Priors 
Sourcery 
the a16z Podcast 
20VC
6 statements about Defense Procurement, every show
Harrison: Bureaucracy Imposes a Million Taxes of Friction on Defense R&D
“It's like, if I ask you to build something that you don't know how to build, it requires a ton of experimentation. But if you have a bean counter along the way, where every time you try and run an experiment, they're introducing three to five to 12 weeks of pr…”
Schimpf: Traditional cost-plus defense contracts are a disaster
“Versus the traditional approach where it's like the government took all the risk and you get a fixed profit fee. That's a disaster. Like everything just gets more complex and more expensive. It doesn't work out.”
Defense procurement takes 15 to 20 years from requirements to full deployment
“So it can be upwards of 15, 20 years to go from first requirements document to full fielding of a system.”
Schimpf: Understanding procurement mechanisms is the most critical part of defense tech
“And having folks with the background in the defense space is incredibly important. How you sell, what that looks like, the types of problems they want to work on, how that whole mechanism works is so different than any other, you know, sort of enterprise sales…”
Schimpf: Defense hardware scaling is difficult due to episodic demand jumps
“The reality with working with a defense customer is you kind of, you know, you have very few buyers, right? It's like, there's not that many customers you're working with. And so you, you're kind of subject to their timing and desire for what they're going to …”
Flournoy: Procuring IT like fighter jets guarantees technical obsolescence before deployment
“We cannot try to procure IT-driven solutions the way we procure aircraft carriers or fifth-generation fighter jets. It just doesn't work. It's a recipe for being obsolete before you even fully feel the capability.”