The Exchanges

Q options, crypto, all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped one percent match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com slash sorcery, paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description. So given the fact that you split both sides, how do you manage your time between Anduril and Founders Fund?

A I, I don't. I, uh, you know, I'm, I have an awesome, uh, team around me. My EA, Elena, has been with me for over 10 years, and she's an absolute rock star. I have a chief of staff, Ellie Untermeyer, who literally goes wherever I go. Um, so if I'm in San Francisco at Founders Fund, she sits right next to me and makes sure I'm on task. When I come down here to Andreal headquarters, she sits right next to me and makes sure I'm on task. So, uh, it's just kind of whatever task is At hand at that moment. Uh, it, it's just a lot of context switching between the two. Um, and the Founders Fund team has always been really cool about this. I mean, if you, 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. Um, uh, Scott Nolan started General Matter. Delia and Esperohov started Varda, and it's just kind of part of the culture. We're totally fine with, uh, the splitting of time and concentrating our efforts into things that we're the most passionate about. So, I honestly just feel really lucky that I have a team at Founders Fund that is super supportive of this crazy model.

AI assessment note: “I have an awesome, uh, team around me. My EA, Elena”

Q Are you also outsourcing and finding different ways to manufacture?

A We have a lot of manufacturing partners. Obviously, we're not building every subcomponent of everything that we're building, so we're, you know, working with other vendors, we're working with other machine shops, we're working with Other manufacturers. Uh, and then we're pulling it all together, generally in our own facilities. Uh, but, you know, we're, uh, 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, uh, which is where we'll start ramping up our collaborative combat aircraft to the autonomous fighter plane production. Um, and we have other facilities around the country. We have, you know, shipyards. We have, uh, wood and munition assembly that's happening, uh, in Atlanta, Georgia. Uh, you know, we do some stuff right here in Costa Mesa at our headquarters. So, uh, I imagine that there will be multiple factories across, not just the United States, but across, uh, allied and partner nations as well, where we're ramping that manufacturing muscle at the same time.

AI assessment note: “We have a lot of manufacturing partners. Obviously, we're not building every subcomponent”

Q What was it like to open up Arsenal One? I know it's under development, but choosing Ohio, where you're from, what was that like?

A Yeah, at some point when we got down to like the final three states, uh, I realized that the, the bias was going to look really bad to the company, so I just kind of sat back and I'm like, you know what, I don't, I don't want to push this. Uh, I think Ohio's great, obviously as a native Ohioan, uh, I thought it would be awesome to land there. Uh, the reality is that when it comes down to just a competition for, uh, you know, where we were going to end up doing this, and that was some combination of Facilities, the access to utility scale, you know, power, water, things like that, as well as a labor force that could scale with us as we grew out to that five million square feet. Um, Ohio just had the most competitive, uh, opportunity or offer for us. Uh, so, uh, we kind of natively ended up going there. Uh, you know, when, when we did the ribbon cutting, uh, earlier this year, I brought my mom with me since she's just, she lives right down the road. And, uh, You know, having her meet the governor and having the governor thank her as if somehow she was the one that convinced us to go to Ohio was, was somewhat entertaining.

AI assessment note: “I thought it would be awesome to land there... when we did the ribbon cutting”

Q It's interesting because when the company was started, like you said, it was, it was seen as a pariah. You kind of, uh, I would say like got a lot of support for a while, but now it seems like there's some backlash coming back. So what do you think people get wrong about Andurl and what do you want to correct?

A Well, I, I tend to not really think about what the media says. Um, I'm, I'm not super concerned about, you know, the Wall Street Journal or Reuters or whatever. Like, honestly, they just looked kind of silly talking about, you know, crashes during test flights. It's like, That's what happens guys. That's what happens when you move fast. If you're not crashing when you're testing, you're not testing very hard. Um, so not really concerned about that. Um, I think like broadly across the defense industry, uh, 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 realize their lunch is being eaten, they're going to get more aggressive. And so that was always our expectation. Um, I, I'm under no illusions that, you know, we're going to be gladly welcomed with, you know, a big hug or something by, ah, by the companies we're competing with. Um, as far as, like, what people get wrong about Android, um, I, I think that, 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. Um, but the core of everything that we do is actually software. Um, and that was the original idea for the company when Matt, Brian, Palmer, uh,…

AI assessment note: “People will think about us as like a hardware company... but the core... is actually software”

Q In the midst of all of this, there's obviously a lot of excitement. There's increased competition on the private side. Public side has its own bottlenecks. I'm curious, where do you think Defense Tech stands for the competitive state?

A Defense as a sector is multi-domain, and so you have things under the sea, things on the surface of the sea, ground vehicles, aerial vehicles, and space, and kind of all of those domains are critical for the Department of War to have dominance in. And so, you know, it's, the annual strategy is to go multi-domain. We don't have, like, a niche approach to delivering autonomy or attribability in any single domain. We want to cover the whole gamut. And this is the way that traditionally defense companies have, have done work. You know, this is the way Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, this is how they do their work as well. Um, and we believe that there's a lot of shared autonomy components that can, uh, cut across all of those domains, uh, that give us an interesting competitive advantage. Um, and you see like in Silicon Valley, even companies that are being started that are attacking each of those layers as well. Um, And, ah, you know, we welcome the competition. 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.

AI assessment note: “we welcome the competition. We think it's really great to have more companies in the space”

Q Do you have any cultural commentary on what's going on in America right now?

A I think culture is really hard to predict. I mean, we've seen big shifts even in the last 10 years that I don't think I would have expected. Um, you know, there's a, a lot of, uh, 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. 10 years ago, if you had asked me, like, Do you think Gen Z will have a rising church attendance and it will be more men than women? I would have, I would have gotten that answer totally wrong. So I'm not sure that I would be able to predict this stuff necessarily. Um, but I think, you know, you've probably seen the meme like, you know, uh, hard times create serious men, serious man create easy. I think that's kind of the moment we're in as people realize that, man, being serious is very important. And, uh, there's more important stuff out there than monkey JPEGs and, you know, AI slop. And, uh, I think it's an opportunity for people to step into a good quest, and so I'm, I'm hopeful at least that we're in a moment of a transition from slop to good questing.

AI assessment note: “I'm hopeful at least that we're in a moment of a transition”