**Matthew Steckman** (0:00)
Yeah, I mean, you basically can't have a defense company if you don't have a large US business. The government thinks that we can deliver some pretty major stuff now and in the future. There are very few drone programs that would create a material enough amount of revenue to actually create a real business. There are lots of VC companies I would love to buy, if I had an unlimited checkbook.
**Harry Stebbings** (0:20)
Is there either like an ethical question of like, do we agree with sending thousands of missiles to Iran? This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today I'm so excited for one of the most current shows we could do. We've got Matthew Steckman, President and CBO, Chief Business Officer for Anduril. Just last week, they announced a monster $20 billion contract with the US military, one of the largest ever. We could not have a more apt or pertinent guest, as he takes us behind the scenes of both the contract and of Anduril. But before we dive into the show today, Over 80% of Fortune 100 companies are running their businesses with Airtable. Airtable combines AI with the scale of an award-winning, infinitely flexible no-code system, a platform where you can see all of your data in one place, and use it to make really big-picture decisions. Think of it like mission control for your company. Airtable goes beyond organization and automating repetitive tasks. It lets you use your data to inform strategy, monitor progress and take action. Every cell is capable of performing hundreds of AI-powered tasks, like web research or localization, and using those results to inform and update hundreds or thousands of other cells and workflows in real-time. Unlock the true scale of your workflows at www.airtable.com/20vc, Airtable, the infrastructure of innovation. And just like Airtable organizes your workflow data, Metaview organizes your conversation insights. This episode is brought to you by Metaview. Who says hiring has to be fair? Every founder, VC and exec I speak with knows this. Your ability to hire is the biggest constraint on your company's growth. But recruiting is slow. It's subjective and only getting more competitive. And that's why teams like Eleven Labs, Brex, Replit, Deal and 5,000 other organizations use Metaview, the AI company giving high performance teams a real unfair advantage in hiring. Metaview's built a suite of AI agents that behave like recruiting coworkers. They proactively find candidates. They take interview notes automatically and they help you surface the best candidates in process. For the first time, AI handles the recruiting toil and gives you a single source of truth. That means hours saved per hire and a team focused on what matters most, winning the right candidates as fast as possible. Don't let your competitors out hire you. Metaview customers close roles 30% faster. Try Metaview today and get a free month of sourcing at metaview.ai.
After Metaview captures what was said, Turing helps you build with the people who can deliver after it. Frontier Labs keep facing the same limitation. Models perform well on benchmarks but they fall short once they enter real coding tasks, real tools and real workflows. That disconnect between synthetic evaluation and actual system behavior is now a core blocker for agentic models. That's why NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce, Gemini and other leading lab partners partner with Turing. Turing is the research accelerator focused on post-training reliability. They build realistic RL environments, next-generation data quality systems built from real-world operational traces and coding datasets that stress models under conditions where failures matter, state changes, workflow branching, brittle tool cools and the coding errors that break RL agents but never appear in benchmark reports. In reality, a model may demonstrate correct reasoning in your evaluation setup, yet still select the wrong parameter or mishandle a code update in a realistic interface. Turing makes that failure visible and gives teams the signal they need to fix it. For labs advancing agentic systems, Turing provides the structure required to understand why these failures occur. To find out how, visit turing.com/20vc. That's turing.com/20vc.
You have now arrived at your destination. Matt, I am so excited for this dude. I just got off a chat with Christian Garrett and Matt Grimm, and they gave me like incredibly tough questions. So this is going to be a grueling hour for you. But thank you for joining me, dude.
**Matthew Steckman** (4:34)
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's really great to be here.
**Harry Stebbings** (4:36)
I actually want to start with Trey, weirdly, which was Christian Garrett said that I had to ask this. He said, what was Trey like at Georgetown? And what is it about the Anduril founding team that has made Anduril so successful?
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