The Ledger, every show

“We think it's really great to have more companies in the space that are, ah, you know, moving away from kind of the semi-communist, centrally planned economy way that the department has been doing business for really the last 30 plus years.”

“Pacifism as an idea is only possible inside of a governing system with a monopoly on violence. Like, you can't be a pacifist without a government monopoly on violence. That's just, like, not possible for humanity.”

“The goal is take humans out of dull, dirty, dangerous jobs so we're not putting our, you know, men and women, brothers and sisters, in horribly dangerous situations and become as accurate and precise as possible. And that's really what Just War Theory is all a…”

“And they've taken, like, the route of Big Head in Silicon Valley, the HBO show, where they're just kind of, like, resting, investing, just kind of chilling out, making lifestyle decisions while writing angel checks. And that feels like a real moral failure of …”

“Only fans you know, gambling, I think falls in the feels good is bad camp. This is like society has somehow managed to convince ourselves that there's some like freedom of expression or something like that that should be protected. And I agree, like freedom of…”

“They have a massive advantage against democratic governments because they can mandatorily conscript their most talented people into working on the society on society's greatest problems.”

“The worst deals are the most competitive deals. They're the ones that are super consensus.”

“This is by the way, the biggest risk of taking seed money from an institutional fund is that like doing your prorata is super lazy, doing more than your prorata is actually a signal in If you're not going to have real signal, if you don't have high conviction,…”

“Having like pushing your team to do things like deal memos, for example, forces them to like put down a number that they're later going to be judged by. So the investment team is going to go back and they're going to look at that investment memo and they're go…”

“If you're like a multi-time successful entrepreneur and you're starting like fairly simple, trivial enterprise SAS company, like shame on you. Shame on you. Like, you need to go big. Like, have some vision for how you can impact humanity.”

“If you go back and you look at the best companies in any portfolio, they were kind of the best companies at every stage. Like they were incredibly awesome at A, they were incredibly awesome at B, they were incredibly awesome at C. Very rarely do you see a comp…”

“I think like the writing has been on the wall for a while that globalization didn't really work and that traditional strategic deterrence with nuclear weapons was not going to be the only thing that drove reduction in conflict globally.”

“Andrew operates at higher margins, much faster growth rates. I think we could be worth Over a hundred billion dollars with a tiny fraction of Lockheed's revenue.”

“I think that the big defense companies are constantly delivering things that don't work like they're supposed to, and they're never punished for it.”

“Even if there was complete labor cost parity, we still don't have the ability To just magically reshore a lot of these critical components that are going to be important to the next 50 or a hundred years.”

“I think like broadly across the defense industry this is a pattern that you saw happen with both Palantir and SpaceX as well, is that the big players, the primes, they don't really pay attention at all until their lunch is being eaten. And then the moment they…”

“There's a long history in Companies that are doing business with the department where they have these massive advisory boards of retired generals and things like that, and it was just clear that that's never worked, and so that was never really part of our str…”

“Pacifism as an idea is only possible inside of a governing system with a monopoly on violence. Like, you can't be a pacifist without a government monopoly on violence.”

“I won't say publicly on the Technology Bros podcast that we want cool technology companies to fail because they're bad at business development. But those do present interesting opportunities for us from an M&A perspective, for sure.”

“They, as you said, they have been much more willing than the other big tech companies to think of themselves as an American company, which is incredibly important and also be willing to work with the government on programs where, you know, there's potentially …”

“To get our best and brightest kind of in the way that Israel does to do two years of civil service coming out of high school. I think that would do a couple of things. First, it would actually, like, give us the people that we need to execute on national prior…”

“It takes about 500 pitch meetings before you really know what you're doing.”

“If you can actually be a next generation rebooted version of Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman, that company could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”

“We all run our own strategy. We don't have Monday partner meetings.”

“And I think now in 20, 24, looking back on what happened, it's very easy in retrospect to say, Wow. We really let that get out of hand. And now we've got, we have to do a recap. We have to do a down round. We have to do all this crazy structure, but we're doin…”

“For large funds, the economics only really work if you have a 10 plus billion dollar winner in every fund. Or more than one in, in most cases.”

“Do I think that doing that in the structure of like gather a bunch of investors on your board is the way to do it? No, I think that's really stupid.”

“All upsize maximization. No downside protection silly. Like I think if you go back and you look at our portfolio, like whether or not we got our money back has never impacted fund performance. Like the only thing that moves the needle for a venture fund of our…”

“The biggest lesson that I've learned from these is that there are times where I've gone in and I've said, this has 10 X potential from where it is right now, and therefore it's probably worth making a bet. And I look back on some of those investments that I've…”

“It turns out that the core monopoly investment that won is the only one that mattered in the rest of the category matters a lot less. So if you have some vision for what the future looks like and you're looking for a company to invest in that's doing it rather…”

“There's not gonna be a hundred space X's. There's probably not going to be two space X's”

“Like, the capabilities, the huge expensive platforms that we built for competing with the Soviet Union are not particularly relevant in a future conflict with, you know, a China or an Iran.”

“Can we afford to shoot a two million dollar Patriot missile at a 150,000 dollar cruise missile or kamikaze drone? No, it doesn't make sense anymore.”

“There is a capital advantage to having a billionaire as a co-founder. At Palantir and SpaceX, certainly, it took a really, really long time To get momentum on the business side of things. And so you needed to be able to raise money through a drought.”

“We have really just allowed Our Western political system to just be destroyed by mediocrity. And, you know, we have our standards for our elected leaders are like bargain basement level. It's really pathetic. And I don't know what it's going to take to convinc…”

“And that's probably the most prescient thing we did is to say, We're going to hire a lobbyist literally in the first week of the company's existence, and we're going to build the relationships that we know are going to be important for authorization and approp…”

“One of the most important things that I've learned about hard jack in the 10 years I've been at Founders Fund is that you have to have someone on the founding team who's as good at business as the technical founder is at the tech. There's just no way around it…”

“Is it on us to decide, no, we don't wanna do that because we have some thesis about what's going to happen in this conflict in 20 years? Or is it our responsibility in a democratically elected governmental system to say, we are supporting the Department of Def…”

“Hype is not aligned with outcomes. In fact, it's often negatively correlated with outcomes. And so when something feels super consensus, you should be running away, not running toward.”

“China is playing a subsidized subsidization game with all of their kind of domestic national champions and they're also running a very effective 40 chess strategy with the Belt and Road Initiative, which has put the United States and our allies and partners in…”

“In some ways it's like you're starting with the right flyer and then coming back with fully autonomous fighter plans to be built, you know, less than an hour drive. Away from where the Wright brothers were building the first airplane.”

“People will think about us as like a hardware company where we're building all of these big systems, many of which you can probably see in the background of the camera here. But the core of everything that we do is actually software.”

“Concentration and venture is a really important one. This is like the idea that you don't want to have a thousand investments in a billion dollar fund. You want to have like a massive amount of concentration in the top few positions in that fund. That's someth…”

“Even if there was complete labor cost parity, we still don't have the ability To just magically reshore a lot of these critical components that are going to be important to the next 50 or a hundred years.”

“I think this is like kind of a once in a generation opportunity to build you know kind of a BMF in the law enforcement space, a la axon which is the company formerly named taser.”

“I would actually argue that it's harder to sell to the government than it is to build a product that's relevant to the government.”

“The old defense industry model is like, wait for the contract and then build by the hour. Basically, that's how it works.”

“Going out and raising these mega rounds at massive prices. It kind of reminds me of the self driving car phenomenon where you had these companies that understandably were capital intensive and it was like, man, if it works, it's going to be great. Everybody's …”