The Ledger, every show

“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?”

“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…”

“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.”

“You basically can't have a defense company if you don't have a large US business.”

“There are very few drone programs that would create a material enough amount of revenue to actually create a real business.”

“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…”

“So in every technology class in defense, there's probably one, sometimes two actual programs that if you capture them, you have a business. And if you don't, you have no business.”

“There'll be one that wins, right? It's going to be really hard to pick it, I think is the problem. Like, but there will definitely be one winner.”

“We have to be able to build something that takes advantage of commercial supply and commercial manufacturing techniques as opposed to aerospace and defense supply and technique.”

“If those companies are myopically focused on that conflict, they will not have a business coming out the other end.”

“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.”

“When you are a public company, there is an additional level of trust That is afforded to you that you don't have when you're a private company.”

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

“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…”

“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'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 …”

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

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

“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…”

“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 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…”

“Founding teams, one of the most important things in, in defense is some of them can be outsiders and, you know, brilliant technologists and thinkers. It does take a lot of inside knowledge and I think that one of the things we got right and keep getting right …”

“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 …”

“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…”

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

“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.”

“50% of defense spending is in the US and 50% is in the rest of the world.”

“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.”

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