Love: Defense tech ecosystem will fail if startups cannot scale manufacturing
Connor Love · Connor Love (Lightspeed) on Everything You Need to Know About Defense Startups · Apr 1, 2025 · at 17:16
Connor Love of Lightspeed Venture Partners discusses the primary failure mode and manufacturing bottlenecks facing venture-backed defense tech companies.
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“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 tech, while it's still small in the grand scheme of things of the budget, I do fundamentally believe that snowball has started to move, and so how we fail, to be clear, is that if we cannot produce at scale with efficiency in this, in the scopes that we say they were gonna do it and, you know, for better, for worse, like, we don't have an industrial base in the United States to solve that.”
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