Defense Startups

“The challenge becomes in defense that if you're missing any of the 12 different types of disciplines it takes to really capture a large program, you will fail.”

“There aren't actually a lot of big programs in government, and so one of the things you don't need to necessarily look for, I think what you would, in a traditional hiring process, you would look for someone who has demonstrated the ability to Capture a large …”

“And I think that's the next stage and you're going to see companies start to cross that chasm here in the next one to two years.”

“Removing the past performance requirement from these larger contracts is going to level the playing field where then you're going to have companies that have been around for a long time. If they have the best product, they can prove they have the best product.…”

“The primes play a like really key role in national defense. They have resources, they have capabilities. They can do things frankly, that. You know, and say essentially no other startup can do. And so we need to treat them accordingly in that way.”

“There's no way that any startup, no matter how great you are, is ready to spend five billion dollars in a single year.”

“I'm investing a lot actually in Ukrainian defense startups, because I think my vision is that Ukraine could become the manufacturing hub for defense.”

“It's not an accident that the people who've had success have done it before. And you don't have to be the founder who's done it before, but your co-founder could, or your head of sales needs to, or your COO needs to, you need to find people who have built a ca…”

“Stop trying to use the Department of Defense as your only means of revenue. And I mean that because if you get complacent with the Department of Defense, then you are no longer actually on the quest that you were on. And it's just not, it's not good. We want t…”

“For larger companies like Andrel, you know, they're working on 10 programs at once, so if a couple of them get delayed, it's not a huge issue. I think Dellian's out Absolutely right about like, if you're a startup and you're bidding on one and that revenue cyc…”

“I think for some of the more fragmented tail, I think they're maybe not to zero, but I think they're going, going to go down.”

“So, so all of these companies would be competing for a very small pool of people, and I, it's just impossible to have turned them all into primes. It will just, it just not gonna happen.”

“I think there's something about the new crop of these startup defense companies, which are actually, actually competent and actually have our best and brightest. Versus kind of the rotten legacy kind of places that become like a weird distorted version of gove…”

“We need dozens of new innovative companies that are going to modernize our military, and I want to point out these can't be companies that are founded by people who have already made billions of dollars running other companies.”

“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…”