The Ledger, every show

“The more process you have, the easier that it is to game the process to get to some mediocre outcome.”

“It turns out that like, you just, it's basically impossible to get into good schools if your guidance counselor doesn't know all of the admissions officers at the Ivy league schools or whatever.”

“You know, you see these communities of blue collar industrial workers that have historically been Democrats that have shifted over to being populist Republicans. And it's because they're just ignored.”

“I'm not sure that it is, and I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that spending your life working for a consultant firm is probably not the path to having the most enlightened experience.”

“I'm not like in, in a war with elite universities, but I do think that there's some distortion that's happened that requires correction.”

“Twenty million sounds low. I mean, if you only lose twenty million dollars figuring out how to do this, then that's pretty good.”

“And this, for example, is why Founders Fund was why Peter put us in San Francisco when everyone else was on Sand Hill, because he wanted us to avoid getting caught up in this, like, are they going and meeting all the way down the street with all the other peop…”

“The thing that I actually like a lot less is the false sense of scarcity and urgency. And that was like what was happening in 20, 21, where the founder was saying like, you have 24 hours. I have a, I have an exploding term sheet. I'm going to pull the trigger …”

“We were the first fund that was talking about being founder friendly”

“At Founder's Fund, we won't do the investment if we don't believe it can return the fund.”

“If you look at any of the big outcomes across our portfolio, whether it's you know, Spotify, Stripe, Airbnb, Palantir, SpaceX, Andrel stem centric. So if you look at all of these big outcomes for us, every single one of them, there was someone on the team bang…”

“No, because I think the best founders are going to pick Really strong markets and they will increase the probability of success even in like a middling market. So I think the founder has to be the atomic element always, but obviously like there are going to be…”

“Definitely in the first six months I think you can get a sense for momentum. There's almost nothing as important as momentum in startups.”

“And this isn't something that's going to take six months. It's something that's probably going to take closer to three years.”

“All of the authorities that need to exist to buy products from non-traditional companies, they all exist.”

“Shifting that risk to us rather than putting it on the government was really important to those early wins.”

“You have to be Good at selling to the government to make companies in this sector work. You just, you can't, you either have enough money to survive being bad at it for a long time, or you know what you're doing from the beginning.”

“And so I think being in a place where I'm operationally engaged at Andrel, like, I actually, I'm up to date. Like I know what people are using. I know what like is impacting our business in a meaningful way. I know what stuff that we're, we started using that …”

“I think it would be better and more interesting if it were because I think that most of the advice that I've gotten the most out of is from existing founders or former founders or operators. Like they're the ones that have lived in those shoes. They're the one…”

“And so as an investor, when I look at something and I'm like, yeah, this is a vice investment. Maybe it's probably going to make a lot of money because it leads to addiction or loneliness or You know, whatever. I don't want to be involved in that. I don't want…”

“Thinking back to when we started Anvil in 2017 as kind of the pariah of Silicon Valley. It was like not something people were doing, it was incredibly unpopular, and now all of a sudden there's like almost nothing as popular. Maybe AI slop enterprise SaaS comp…”

“In the first quarter of next year, we'll be opening our soon to be five million square foot factory campus called Arsenal One, just outside of Columbus, Ohio which is where we'll start ramping up our collaborative combat aircraft, the autonomous fighter plane …”

“You have to hire a strong government relations team because your customer is not the budget appropriator. Like they're not the same. So you have to be able to work the administration. You have to be able to work Congress. You have to work political appointees …”

“You know, there's a lot of surveys that show that for the first time in modern civilization, you have more women or more men in the most recent generation in Gen Z going to church than women. It's like that has never happened before.”

“We're pulling people from Consumer businesses to build a consumer profile for a defense company, and that's really never been done before.”

“We have no build program, there's no incubation policy or anything like that at Founders Fund, but, you know, Peter started Palantir. I started Anderil. Scott Nolan started General Matter. Delia and Esperohov started Varda, and it's just kind of part of the cu…”

“It really does not make sense or would not have made sense for Andrel in 2017 to go and compete in these highly, you know, crowded marketplaces. We went and targeted an area where there were no venture backed players at all. And that gave us an incredible head…”

“In the first quarter of next year, we'll be opening our soon to be five million square foot factory campus called Arsenal One, just outside of Columbus, Ohio which is where we'll start ramping up our collaborative combat aircraft to the autonomous fighter plan…”

“There's a lot of surveys that show that for the first time in modern civilization, more men in the most recent generation in Gen Z going to church than women. It's like that has never happened before.”

“Selling to local governments is incredibly difficult. I think it's basically just as hard as selling to federal government and except the upside is Significantly less.”

“Now, what that means for founders fund, practically speaking, and gov tech is that we tend to want to write more concentrated checks. Once you see production usage of the technology working because it demonstrates that the founder has figured out how to get th…”

“People in D. C. C. S. You know, a real company, not a startup anymore. And I think that that just gives us additional leverage to go and pick up bigger and bigger contracts over time.”

“The more made in America we become, the more made in national prosperity the European nations will become. And I think due to the nature of Europe, that will end up being pretty fragmented. The French government's going to want to Buy from French companies. Th…”

“Everyone agrees that these things are good. But what that means is that the categories end up being hyper competitive. It's like so consensus. There's so many companies being built.”

“The first big check that I wrote at Founders Fund was Flexport. And no one was thinking about Supply chain logistics in 2014.”

“And in order to get anything through, you literally have to just be pounding the table. Like, it is on you to have the level of conviction that's required to get people on board.”

“So when I wanted to make the flex board investment, I had to kind of go through the gauntlet and answer a bunch of questions from the team and pound the table. But at the end of the day, they were like, we made a bet on Trey. Trey has high conviction in this. …”

“And this is going back to that earlier point I was making about heuristics is that you can't constantly convince yourself that every Exception is actually an exception. Usually it's just wrong. Usually you should just follow your instincts around the heuristic…”

“Like I was on the verge of just leaving venture capital.”

“We don't generally want to take board seats. We are incredibly hands-off and operationally helpful when asked, but only reactively.”

“Our core vision is we just want to invest in the best founders, building the best companies that are going to be category, category defining. And I think you can do that through a very traditional venture model of, can we get a check into the series A and can …”

“The founder is the atomic element, a really great founder and team are going to be able to pivot their way into strong product market fit. Whereas a great idea with a weaker founding team are going to get stuck and will likely spin out.”

“I would say the most common example is where you have a founder that doesn't build a, like a, Diverse enough set of skills around them with the rest of their founding team or their executive team. And they assume that their, you know, specific superpower will …”

“You have to have a, like a whole, a holistic view of government relations, lobbying telling, being really good at telling a narrative, Communicating to agency heads, decision makers, and your potential users in the field. And I think that this is like the type…”

“We should keep in mind that the co-founder CEO is Brian Schimpf, who is the most brilliant software engineer I've ever worked with.”

“This is probably like, not to put a, you know, a target on your back, Harry, but this is the most naive question that non-defense people ask, because the reality is that we don't decide. The US government decides.”

“The entropy on, like, knowledge of operationally being engaged with the startup is so fast. All the things that I did at Palantir for six years, like, I feel like were relevant for, like, my first three years at Founders Fund.”

“So, not only, you know, the secretary, but also his entire senior leadership was here, and so being able to interact with Under Secretary Duffy, Under Secretary Michael General Counsel you know, it was a really cool opportunity, not only for, You know, Andrew'…”