Defense

“Back then the defense of a country or of a democratic society was grouped for banks in the same bucket as pornography and gambling and smoking.”

“If you look at the size of the market share in, in, in satellites, you know, defense is probably the, by and large, the largest need for satellite imagery.”

“Lithium-ion batteries we have today are kind of good enough from a range standpoint, so like, it would be cool to have a thousand watt-hour per kilogram battery, but not at four times the price. Like, I just don't, I think that would not get traction in the EV…”

“I would say something on the alloy side, like aerospace, we feel good opportunity three to five year timeline. Yeah, correct. I think it'll be an application, not like manned flight. Like, I don't think it'll be a jet turbine because of the constraints there w…”

“What you're seeing in the headlines today is basically, Hey, AI is all that matters. Maybe defense matters because the world is becoming a slightly more volatile place, and energy matters as a derivative of AI. So if you're not already super exposed to those i…”

“They just went from zero percent of GDP to three percent of GDP spent on defense.”

“Our biggest, fastest growing businesses are in the civilian sector. They're not in defense.”

“I think the first schism was really during Vietnam, where people felt like they were lied to about the war. It drove a fundamental schism between academia and defense. And that we've never really healed from that schism.”

“The Pentagon budget for new shit is fairly finite, and I think there'll be five or six big winners in defense. I'm not sure there'll be a hundred.”

“There is no question that in the future you'll have AI agents on offense run by the good guys to train the AI on defense run by the good guys.”

“We do about 30% of our businesses defense.”

“And so our bet in robotics and what we've been doing with multiple companies in defense in particular is to build that platform that allows to train models fit to purpose that can then be deployed on the edge potentially”

“I think we're spending more on our interest than on our defense now, which is crazy.”

“Defense is a very unique world where you're going to build a lot of different products at relatively low volumes.”

“Almost every major country in Europe has made a commitment to double or more their spending their GDP level spend on, on defense.”

“I'm pretty sure we're going to see five to ten billion dollar ARR companies in healthcare, education, defense, and retail. In the next 10 to 15 years that are not going to be head-on competing with the same companies that are competing code generation.”

“I would say, and I think this ties into our conversation so far, that AI, that defense is the next AI.”

“So I do think, look, there's no way around it. Skoya was late to defense.”

“And so, anyways, I think that the Transformer paper moment was the was the Ukraine war, and then I think the Chi-GPT moment hasn't happened yet. And so I think that defense is actually, you know, is under-hyped in some ways, or like underestimated in some ways”

“We got into defense in about a year and a half after we started, and we, then we did construction and mining, and then commercial trucking, and So we got into all these adjacent industries to, like, also to diversify the company, right?”

“And what's been fascinating to see is like almost of the private capital is a hundred fifty billion dollars has been invested in defense over the last three years. That's as much as the previous 10 years.”

“When the automotive industry is shrinking because of some of the factors you mentioned, those people immediately find jobs in other industries which are growing. Whether that is censors, whether that is defense.”

“I don't think there are going to be a hundred massive drone companies. I think there will be a couple. I do think that drones are going to play a major role in, you know you know, future conflicts and defense.”

“I think, let's say, 10 years ago, there was more controversy on should you do defense or not. I think that's all basically gone in Silicon Valley”

“And I think what we learned after we got into the business, we started the company was actually the dynamics that exist in automotive are the same that exist in defense, they exist in construction, mining, they exist in trucking, and so... And then they not on…”

“And there's probably, what, two to three trillion can be spent over the next five to eight years in Europe, in defense, actually, and all layers, not just final product, but like components, and there's lots of layers here, I think.”

“A significant amount of the investors that now all talk about defense literally had it in their LPA of, you know, the three things that they weren't allowed to invest into was gambling, porn, and defense. And it was like put as one of those top three effective…”

“I think it's pretty likely that, you know, over the next decade, some of those LPAs end up going back to having defense in the vice clause.”

“And now the defense has to be automated, because there's no way to keep up with automated attackers.”

“I'm not sure whether we'll be able to create those companies kind of in the next two or three years to a point where they provide sufficient sovereignty, but I'm very sure we can do it over the next five to 10 years.”

“The government really only spends money on three things. Interest, right? Defense and entitlements. Everything else is kind of a rounding error.”

“I think I think he's the, gonna be look back as the TK of defense. Like, he's like one of one individual”

“My vision is we're going to see a lot of Teslas and SpaceX and NVIDIA is being built across those physical industries like energy, supply chain, defense, et cetera.”

“Anticipate there's going to be a number of companies that are able to provide swarms of vessels, both on the surface and also subsurface that are able to not only protect our shores and our allies, but are able to detect environmental damage issues in our ocea…”

“These companies usually become holding companies pretty quickly and attract all of the talent. There's finite talent around things like aerospace. There's finite talent around things like defense. So you don't see as many competitors. And as I said, they are h…”

“No, no, no. It's for the companies who want to make their drones a stability flight. So they are applying it for different use cases in cities. So it's mostly for the people who want to make a Drone is safer, more drone safer technology and fly accurately with…”

“And if you can get through the regulatory hurdles or the procurement hurdles and see that market on the other side, you are competing against the slowest moving incumbents because they have had an effective monopoly for decades. That's true of education. That'…”

“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.”