The Ledger, every show

“And so I think the area of tanks is probably over.”

“We try really to keep the foot on the gas really aggressively, because we want to build a company that really matters, and we will never sell the company.”

“Last year we flew a real fighter jet and we flew the Saab Gripen over the Baltic Sea. And when I say we, our AI did and took full control of the plane in air combat against and another Gripen, which was human controlled. And so we flew three air combat scenari…”

“Crude manned, you know, fighter jets were going to be very difficult to deploy in the future because you'll, you'll end up Facing these swarms of autonomous fighter jets with superhuman capabilities, and it's not science fiction.”

“Over time there just won't be, I think the capability even of partners and as it looks to also not the willingness to do so.”

“I actually think none of this stuff really matters that much. I think what really matters is founder quality and founder ambition. So I think for a country to be successful, they should attract the most aggressive founders. And everything else is a lot less im…”

“I think the threat is extremely plausible in the next few years.”

“I, again, I think it's plausible that there will be a conflict. When? It's hard to tell. I don't think it's 10 years away if it happens. It's probably quite a lot sooner than that.”

“I used to think that, that you needed to make sure that there was always a degree of process when teams work together on something and including something new. I have now learned that it's possible with exceptional people to let's, let's just let them get on w…”

“Probably ByteDance, and I would shut down TikTok immediately.”

“The deterrence that you get out of having a very large number of strike drones at your border, I think is, is pretty is pretty strong, and the reason is that if you turn up with tanks on the other side, let's say you turn up with 3000 tanks, 100,000 strike dro…”

“I think it's going to be a battle of materiel. It's machines versus machines. The reason for this is that the autonomous mass, as we call it, so the number of drones that can fly in a coordinated way is getting better and better, and it's going to be very hard…”

“And at the same time, if you want to have humans on the battlefield, I think it's going to be very difficult. And I think the trend is going to be, and I think people are realizing this, is that it's going to be unethical to send humans on a battlefield where …”

“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.”

“And then we sadly have a continent where we don't have breakout companies because people just lack the aggression.”

“I think commentary is entirely worthless and it has almost, it has no positive contribution. The only thing that it does is It I think it drags some people down so it has a net negative benefit, and it obviously is, is encouraged through you know, the way the …”

“When we started Helsing in March, 2021, we actually put one of our slides that we thought there were going to be two galvanizing events. One of them was going to be an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the other one an invasion of Taiwan by China.”

“The thing that we have to avoid is the Tesla moment for the defense sector. If we collectively, including the primes, don't understand that and don't adapt, the same thing is going to happen to defense, As happened to the car industry.”

“You can achieve a lot in particular around software with three to four exceptional people. And so we'd rather have a team of four exceptional people than eight good people. It makes everything easier. It's also cheaper, by the way, even though you pay above ma…”

“The people I work with are usually senior and don't need that much guidance. If I need a one-to-one with them every week, I think something's probably gonna, is probably going wrong.”

“I used to do them religiously, by the way, I just stopped doing them. It hasn't had a negative impact.”

“Most drone companies right now build small numbers of quite exquisite drones. They're quite expensive. You know, it's sometimes a bit of a boutique business where people really care about the hardware and the carbon and everything else.”

“You can counter them but you can't counter them with the current systems that we have. You can't just have exquisite, exquisite systems like tanks or artillery guns that are not particularly well connected that take a while to take a shot. You need to work bas…”

“At the moment you have one operator operating one drone. That's going to happen It's going to happen quite quickly that that's going to change, and you'll be able, as a single operator, to control multiple drones, and that trend, I think, we'll see playing out…”

“If you just think about the economics of it, you still have a really strong asymmetry, and so it'll become harder and harder unless you find a way to really counteract these systems, which is hard, to send expensive tanks and artillery systems into battle when…”

“You'll, it'll be impossible, and I think ethically extremely problematic, to send humans into a battlefield that is essentially Facing large numbers of autonomous intelligence systems on the other side.”

“In general, they're not incentivized to Spend a lot of their own money on R&D. I think it's probably less than five percent or so.”

“A very small number. An extremely small number.”

“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.”

“If you really want scale drone usage, they have to fly autonomously. You want to have a human surveying them, looking at what they're doing, and being on or in the loop, but the drones themselves need to be AI controlled and autonomous. It's the only way to ge…”

“Pretty much the whole frontline is GPS jammed, so you can't use your GPS receiver, so you need to find a different way to navigate and know where you are. You either do that with a human trying to recognize where they are, just almost like a pilot of a plane d…”

“I think it's 95% of a company's success is that. Everything else, like I said, is excuses. So regulation doesn't matter.”

“And this happened after two years and four months of founding the company. I think we became the fastest to go from founding to program off record.”

“So, so we decided to acquire an aircraft manufacturer outside Munich, our outside Munich with its own runway hangars and full aircraft manufacturing capabilities and build our own fighter jet, which is now called the CA-I and then put Centaur on it. As the cor…”

“We never set it up, honestly, to have the systems deployed at scale in Ukraine, which is what we have right now.”

“If you look at something like the like the CA-I our autonomous fighter jets, it's designed in such a way that it can take off from any kind of makeshift airstrip, which would be a road, an autobahn, a motorway, a highway, et cetera.”

“We just closed a one billion framework contract in, in Germany”

“I do think it's in human nature to have at least parts of the population that want to have conflict, that enjoy conflict, that want to you know, increase their sphere of influence sometimes You know, that is political. Sometimes it's geographical. Sometimes yo…”

“It would be much harder for us to build Helsing if the founder backgrounds had already been in defense companies. Just much harder. It's easier to be an outsider.”

“Well, I, I've seen actually quite a lot of people turn around, including at my previous company as well, in, on a performance management plan. So it's not a foregone conclusion.”

“You need to basically always have pressure on the pipeline of good people coming in, in order to be able to manage other people out, and so that you end up with a pool of people that are amazing.”

“And the second thing that allowed us to do is, is to not go for innovation you know, projects in defense for incubators and, you know, little grants here and there, but because we were quite well funded, we could go for programs of record. So the official larg…”

“But I think if you want to have people really engaged with these kinds of technologies and capabilities in a company, you need to go further than that. You need to build a view that goes beyond just what is quite static export law.”

“I think it's less than one percent.”

“I believe Ukraine is, is building one and a half million FPV drones, the small first person view drones, drones a year. I think Russia is building roughly the same.”

“But I had to learn that, that is just a very small part of building a prime. It's like one eighth, maybe, or something. It's product market fit. Then you have to do all the rest.”

“I don't think that there is a lack of capital in Europe. Certainly not seed, series A, symptoms even series B.”