AI & Defense Technology with Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf

**Conviction** (0:05)
Welcome to No Priors. Today, we're speaking with Brian Schimpf, the co-founder and CEO of Anduril, a next-generation defense technology company. Anduril made early use of AI in its creation of low-cost drones, sensor networks, machine vision, and other systems.
We're excited to explore what AI means for the future of defense. Brian, it's great to have you on the show.

**Brian Schimpf** (0:25)
Hey, thank you very much for having me on.

**Conviction** (0:27)
Well, I would love to start with your personal story and background, how you got interested in technology, how you got interested in defense tech. I know you worked on a variety of robotics and other things. It would just be great to hear about what led you to start this great company.

**Brian Schimpf** (0:41)
Absolutely. So someone has been coding since I was 12 I love doing it forever. If I could just have spare time, I'd actually just be coding. I love it. It's great.
In college, I ended up working on self-driving cars when that was just getting started. So I worked on DARPA Grand Challenge, Urban Challenge.
We had a small but mighty team at Cornell that was mostly undergrads, just a handful of us. It was a pretty amazing time to see how fast robotics technology could progress. It went from literally nothing working in like, what was it, 2004, to multiple teams being able to drive through cities in 2007 So just the pace that this technology can move was really impressive to see.
After that, I went out to Silicon Valley at Joint Palantir. I started out as like a Ford deployed engineer, so I was working with customers all the time. And that's where I ended up working a lot with the government, national security space. And the thing that was really amazing to me was the degree to which people in that space really cared about the mission, what they were doing in the sense of purpose that they had around the problems they were trying to solve and how important they were. And that's just an incredibly motivating aspect of working in this area.
Combined with it being some of the most technically challenging and hard problems that you can get your hands on, it's a really interesting and unique space to work on. At Palantir, I ended up running product and engineering towards the end, built some really cool products, particularly in the data space around how do you do analytics, how do you make the stuff work at scale, and how do you build modern software in an intelligent way, while also doing this in the government space. So got a lot of experience there. And then ended up founding Anduril with some really good friends, inclusive of Trey Stephens, Matt Graham. We had met up with Palmer Lucky, who started Oculus, totally interesting guy, like an incredible character, like an incredible human. And he was incredibly passionate about the defense space as well. And so when he was getting out of Facebook, or as he would insist, I say, when he was fired from Facebook, we decided it was time to do this. So we got together and started Anduril around 2017

**Conviction** (2:48)
And you met your co-founders besides Palmer at Palantir. Is that right? Did you all work together before?

**Brian Schimpf** (2:54)
That's right. So Matt and I actually knew each other in college. And then Trey, we met at Palantir. And we were all really good friends.
And having folks with the background in the defense space is incredibly important. How you sell, what that looks like, the types of problems they want to work on, how that whole mechanism works is so different than any other sort of enterprise sales and certainly different than any consumer space. So having people who really understand that mechanism of what does that look like, what is that sales motion, how does this really work, that's probably the most important part of doing defense is understanding how you actually get your technology scaled, deployed and sold, which is like nothing else.
It is a very unique and challenging problem.

**Conviction** (3:38)
Yeah, I would love to talk more about that later. I think when I first met you, one of the things that really stood out was that because I think I met you all when you were just starting the company.
And I was really excited about defense tech at the time because Google had just shut down Maven, which was there working with the DoD, which I thought was really odd, you know, given that traditionally the technology industry had spent a lot of time working with the defense industry. And so it felt like there was a real opportunity to do a lot in terms of new technologies for the defense world. But the only company in defense I ever ended up actually investing in is Anduril.