defense tech

“I think we could see the same thing play out in defense. I think we could see the same thing play out in AI.”

“And it was a big shift from like the defense tech boom, the gundo boom. A lot of those guys had had rough goes in like the Wi-Fi money era, realized it was not very durable, very zero sum, and moved over to something that was more tangible.”

“I mean, I think that you could make a pretty compelling argument that Austin is a way better place to build a health company, a defense tech company, like any number of these sort of hard tech or other companies that You know, the Bay doesn't necessarily have …”

“When you're a defense that company, you need two things. You need to build great technology. But you also need to be able to sell it, and you need to understand, like, government sales, government procurement, and Alon is a genius at building great technology,…”

“I think how this entire ecosystem, both from an entrepreneurial and a VC perspective, like defense tech, how this goes wrong is we actually cannot deliver on the systems that we are selling the government. I actually think the snowball of, like, accepting new …”

“More importantly, like, you know, the crazy thing about defense tech that I think not a lot of people realize is there's really not the concept of product-led growth. Like, you can't just dog food something with a customer, and then all of a sudden the colonel…”

“What I lead a lot of is all our national security, all of our defense stuff. And it comes out of the same core funds. So it's not a separate thing where, We have to deploy five hundred million dollars a year in this.”

“So, yeah, I think there's gonna be some tough reconciliation that happens, you know, over the course of the next year or two, where it's, like, there's gonna be, like, you know, 50 to 60% of this field that's just gonna have to die off or get acquired for penn…”

“I don't think you need to have a military background to do this. I think there's amazing American patriots that just want to get involved and they have really core technical skills elsewhere. I think it's helpful that, you know, folks came from the visceral op…”

“But I haven't seen that particular bubble sort of like wind down yet. We're still seeing some pretty active, heavy, heavy investing there.”

“Even though you have a catalyst, there's probably only a six to 12 month window where defense tech is non-obvious.”

“Now I think defense tech is becoming consensus. It's too obvious. And so it's like valuations are incredibly high”

“They increase the size of the market because de facto, nobody wants to find an underrated market where there's only one person. So like, if you're the one person, the percentage of the defense budget you can get is much smaller. And two, they set up a comparat…”