511. The Future of Military Planning: Defense Tech Beyond the Bubble, AI Software as Combat Power, and the Rise of AI Wargaming (Grant Demaree)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
Welcome to the podcast about Venture Capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is The Full Ratchet.

**Brenna Kuyper** (0:40)
Grant Demaree joins us today from the Bay Area. He's the CEO and founder of Onebrief, the defense company building the operating system for military planning. Onebrief recently closed a 200 million Series D at over 2 billion valuation, and acquired Battle Road Digital, a leader in wargaming and simulation technology.
I'm especially excited to guest host today's episode. I'm Brenna Kuyper, Executive Producer of The Full Ratchet and Grant's West Point Classmate. Grant, welcome to the show.

**Grant Demaree** (1:10)
Hey, thanks for having me Brenna. It's good to see you again.

**Brenna Kuyper** (1:12)
You too. I'd love to jump right in with a quick backstory on what you've been doing since we last saw each other and your path to tech.

**Grant Demaree** (1:21)
Let's do it. So we were West Point 2013 classmates. So I left school, went to the 101st, had a couple of army deployments where I was exposed to operational military planning. First in Liberia for Ebola, later in Iraq as part of the counter-ISIS mission. And I thought this military planning, it's upstream of all the military decisions. And if we could fix this, we would make military staffs truly superhuman and we'd fix everything.
Almost everything. So I got out of the army and set out on a number of adventures to try to fix it, which I think you'll hear about today.

**Brenna Kuyper** (2:00)
Yeah, awesome. Can you talk briefly about what your mission at Onebrief is?

**Grant Demaree** (2:04)
We're here to fix military decisions. And we see this as making each military headquarter superhuman so that we can deter wars and when necessary, win.

**Brenna Kuyper** (2:14)
Amazing. Obviously very much needed.
How would you say your West Point background and your army background prepared you for becoming a founder and where you are today?

**Grant Demaree** (2:25)
There's two sides to this. There's the generic founder side and then there's the Onebrief in particular. And I think it helped with Onebrief in particular pretty well because I just wouldn't have thought of the customer and the user and the problem this way if I hadn't spent a bunch of time with it. Spending a lot of time witnessing these large scale operational military decisions was kind of why I imagined what would a military staff look like if it were truly perfect and how much of a change in the military's combat power would that be. And I actually think it's huge. I think you could probably multiply your combat power about eightfold by getting to perfection. And I think that the idea of military planning as like the thing that's upstream of everything else and fixing it as the prime mover to change everything else, it's just really, really unnatural. And it's not really where the market was thinking at the time we started this. And I don't think you get to that conclusion as an outsider. On the question of did the background prepare me for this company? Like, hell yeah, I did this because of that. I don't really want to construe West Point as a founder factory though. That obviously doesn't bear out in the numbers.
We have this huge number of super ambitious people and it has not manifested in the density of unicorn startups that you see at Harvard or Stanford. And I don't think that's for lack of trying.
I have some theories about why that we can get into, but I'll hold on that for now.

**Brenna Kuyper** (3:59)
Yeah, we'll have to remember to come back to that.
You kind of touched on this briefly, but you were early to Wargaming, Course of Action Development, Operational Planning as a real software market. What did you see that others were missing?

**Grant Demaree** (4:13)
So I guess there's one sense in which I was totally not early, because everything that we did is something that a bunch of people had already tried to do a lot of times, starting with Secretary McNamara. So almost everything in Onebrief, from automated or semi-automated operational military plans to full global integration, was all something that after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Secretary McNamara tried to put in place, and there were at least 12 efforts to do this that I know of, and probably more that I don't know of.