Connor Love of Lightspeed Venture Partners explains why Anduril's M&A strategy and go-to-market power make it uniquely effective at scaling acquired defense technologies.
Opinion
Love: The US Defense Department should stop funding SBIR grants entirely
“We need to stop funding a single Sibber in, in our DoD and in our federal government.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Love: There will not be 100 Andurils; many defense VCs will fail
“Like, to be clear, I'm not pounding the drum that, like, there's gonna be a hundred andurils. Like, I hate to break it to you. There's not. There's gonna be a lot of investors who are gonna lose their shirts. There's gonna be a lot of entrepreneurs who are gon…”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Love: 1 to 3 defense startups will win $100M+ contracts this year
“I just think there's so much in your money up for grabs that I think by the end of the year, and hold me to this you're gonna see one, two, three companies that will get, I mean, high hundreds of millions of dollars of in-year revenue grabbed for real producti…”
Opinion
Love: Defense tech ecosystem will fail if startups cannot scale manufacturing
“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 …”
Insight
Love: Selling pure software tools to government will not yield venture returns
“On the other end of the spectrum, you're not going to have big enough outcomes if you're just making another CRM to, or a software tool to apply to the government.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Love: US small-business defense manufacturing base is dying
“The mom and pop shops are dying. I visited them, you know, like, you know, from Southern California initially, you go out into the kind of desert there. And, you know, it's like one guy after one guy, after one, he's built like a seven million dollar business …”