Assertion Partly supported
Harrison: F-35 Program Costs Could Reach $1T Versus Projected $13B–$15B
“And like you have projects that should have cost 13, fifteen billion dollars that are upwards could cost a trillion dollars, like the F-thirty-five program, right? It's like dramatic overages.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Harrison: Ukraine is live testing and fielding military tech faster than the US or China
“Ukraine was like the military industrial complex in production where it's like they're live testing stuff. Way more rapidly, even than, like, even the US at its best, even China or wherever. In Ukraine, it's just, we try something and we immediately field it, …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Harrison: Anduril risks private capital on internal R&D instead of government funds
“Where the military, you know, where the military is trying to acquire things built to spec, the goal of Anduril is to acquire things built to mission, right, so they fund their own R&D, they put their own money up, rather than asking the government for R&D dol…”
Insight
Harrison: Anduril is shifting from augmenting defense assets to replacing them
“And now increasingly, what is most impressive is that what started as very much a sort of, like, product suite of adjacencies of, like, these are all things that will augment a lot of existing assets. We're now getting into potentially, like, asset replacement…”
Insight
Harrison: Autonomous aircraft like Fury extend pilot reach while eliminating pilot risk
“So like you look at, so Fury as an example, it's not only replacing in some cases, because there are some missions that we no longer need to send pilots into danger, we can do it autonomously, but there are some cases where you still want human judgment and sp…”
Assertion Supported
Harrison: Anduril has had products deployed in Ukraine since day one
“Palmer says that Anduril has had products on the ground in Ukraine basically since day one. They were over there pretty quickly, you know, deploying assets and stuff like that.”
Insight
Harrison: U.S. defense innovation requires pairing technical builders with military mavericks
“This sort of like one-to-one pairing of people who are doing hard things and military mavericks who are protecting and enabling their ability to execute that has been a very important capability throughout the history of sort of military innovation in the U.S.”
Insight
Harrison: America's main existential threat is self-inflicted capability failure
“None of them could have an impact on the U.S. Because the U.S. Has such a unique in history and in geography and nation states, such a unique capability. That it is very diff, the US is a, has a lot of unfair advantages, and so what Lincoln says is, if we are …”
Insight
Harrison: Military superiority is always front-run by industrial superiority
“Every single time military superiority is front run by industrial superiority. We did that in World War II. The problem is now that China is doing that today.”
Opinion
Harrison: Anduril started on day one where Palantir was in year 10
“Anduril on day one got to start where Palantir was in year 10. Like, that, that level of experience and knowledge that is the kind of, like, specialty that they had and resonated with”
Assertion Supported
Harrison: 12 of 16 Thucydides Trap historical cases led to war
“Any time a rising power threatens a established power, it ends in large conflict, great power conflict, and when you look throughout history, there are 16 instances where that happened. Of those 16, 12 of them resulted in mass scale conflict”
Insight
Harrison: VCs chase market size while ignoring ethical consequences of investments
“Like, everybody should be having more philosophical debates about the things that they are investing in. We don't have nearly enough philosophical debates about the implications. We just say, Hey, this is a hot technology and it looks like it's ripping and peo…”
Opinion
Harrison: Investors overlook defense supply chain opportunities chasing the next Anduril
“People are under-appreciating a lot of the, like, second and third order effects from, like, a supply chain perspective around defense, because they're so focused on, well, who's gonna be the next andurl, and it's like, you can make a lot of money investing in…”
Insight
Identifying top talent early gives venture investors an unfair advantage
“If you can identify the smartest people as early as possible and then support them relentlessly throughout their career, you have this sort of unfair advantage when those people eventually do start companies.”
Disclosure
Contrary Research intentionally avoids functioning as promotional content marketing
“And we have very deliberately set up contrary research to be like antithetical to content marketing. Like we actively don't want this to be like pumping our own book, which is why we don't exclusively write about our portfolio companies. And even when we do wr…”
Opinion
Deglobalization and global conflict are creating real market opportunities
“Even if you abstract away from like the hype, you still feel like there is a moment in time where, you know, de-globalization is real. Increased global conflict is real. Like those things create market opportunities.”
Insight
Science fiction should serve as a guide for building reality
“Fiction, like science fiction should be a guide for how we think about building reality.”
Insight
Startup failure is necessary to recycle capital into better companies
“Startups are supposed to fail. Like that's like, there are ideas. It is literally a mechanism of iteration and experimentation. Like startups are supposed to go out, try something, experiment. And if it fails, then the capital and the, like the, both the like …”
Insight
Periodic hype deflation in tech is necessary to flush out opportunistic hucksters
“Every once in a while that hype needs to deflate and flush out the hucksters. And candidly, the more that that hype ebbs and flows, the less likely it is that hucksters are going to come in because they've gotten hurt too many times.”
Assertion Partly supported
Anduril's first pitch deck promised making billions by saving the government billions
“In their very first pitch deck, he said, we are going to make billions of dollars by saving the government tens of billions of dollars of revenue and of costs.”
Assertion Supported
Harrison: DoD Accounted for 36% of Global R&D in the 1950s and 1960s
“During the cold war in the fifties and sixties, the DoD alone represented 36% of global R&D.”
Assertion Partly supported
Harrison: Anduril's first Sentry Tower customer was a private ranch owner
“And like their first customer, if I remember correctly, it wasn't even the government. It was a private like ranch owner who wanted to monitor because there was like drug traffickers coming across his land.”
Assertion Supported
Harrison: Anduril's first prototype was an autonomous firefighting tank
“Their first product they ever built and prototyped was? It was called Century, but it wasn't the tower. It was a autonomous firefighting tank that would roll into a forest fire and could deploy, like, fire suppression”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Five of Ramp's first 50 employees came from the Contrary network
“I think five of the first 50 employees at ramp came from contrary, a lot of the people at retool, a lot of the people and roll.”
