Anduril Hits $100B, Saronic Hits $9B 💥 Inside the Defense Tech Boom w/ Dave McClure and Aman Verjee

**Dave McClure** (0:00)
But really, we're seeing growth. Two of the fastest growing companies are probably Palantir and Anduril. I think we're seeing a bunch more of these new defense companies coming in.

**Aman Verjee** (0:10)
I think it's a really good time to be a defense investor.

**Dave McClure** (0:13)
Certainly seemed like there was a lot of people who were surprised at the performance, getting very close to US leading frontier models performance.

**Aman Verjee** (0:21)
We would all benefit if we had a more open source set of competitors. It would be cheaper for a lot of their customers. It would mean that Anthropic and OpenAI would have to compete harder for what they have.

**Dave McClure** (0:45)
Welcome to another episode of our very bad, horrible trading places, the Secondary VC Podcast. We're gonna cover a little bit of macro news before we dive into the rest of our weekly news and updates. What do we got going this week, Aman? We got the Iran ceasefire, lots of words going on. Maybe we'll pull back on the trigger. But oil is over 100 bucks. Google is spending a lot on CapEx. SpaceX is still a little bit underwater. Big news this week is, I guess, everybody talking about China, open weight models, open source models.
Big letter that everybody signed onto in media, etc. But Anthropic and OpenAI did not sign. Anthropic's IPO coming up in October maybe, sometime in Q4 and speculations about revenue growth. Is it growing or slowing? Couple of Chinese IPO, CXMT list in Shanghai, Moonshot listing in Hong Kong.
Databricks raising some secondary at $188 billion. Let's start with a little macro news here. President Trump is angry that the ceasefire is not holding and threatening more strikes, but maybe saner heads inside the administration are like, hey, do we actually have enough rockets? And should we be continuing this? Probably not helping our price of oil. Not going to be great if oil is four bucks a gallon or more towards November.

**Aman Verjee** (2:12)
Yeah, I thought we had a bit of a window there for a while, where it seems like there was at least an agreement to pause the blockades in the Straits of Hormuz while they were negotiating the broader issue. But remember, we were looking at this polymarket charts and thinking, man, these sides are so far apart on some of these key issues. Yeah. I don't know exactly get to an agreement. I know nobody wants to fight to continue, but in terms of the substance of what they're negotiating, they were very far apart on just the ownership of nuclear weapons, and it didn't seem like there was any imminent agreement. The price of all, they'd go up 100 on Thursday, but it was back below on Friday, Saturday, and now we're filming on Sunday, so every day is a little bit of a new thing.

**Dave McClure** (2:47)
Yeah, I don't think we're getting positive likelihood of Strait of Hormuz being open by the end of August, the end of September.
By the end of the year, certainly seems like it's more than a 50% chance, but that's past the election, so kind of cutting it close there. I don't think that's great for the GOP if that continues.

**Aman Verjee** (3:08)
This is the Little Orphan Annie War. It's always, always a day away. Tomorrow and tomorrow, a whole day away.

**Dave McClure** (3:14)
Tomorrow, tomorrow, I'll stop firing rockets. Tomorrow. Google had their earnings call, and although the numbers were great, the stock went down because they're spending $200 billion on CapEx.

**Aman Verjee** (3:32)
Yeah, I thought they had a great quarter. I think they are maybe a little bit on the back foot in terms of the guidance and how they're setting expectations, but let's just go through the quarter that they had. I mean, if you look at their stock price, it looks like they traded off by about 8 or 9 percent in the four days or so since they announced their earnings. You got to think they must have really missed on something bad. They're about 21, 22 times price earnings ratio right now, so a little bit more expensive. Too expensive. It doesn't seem, no, that's right in line with S&P 500 That doesn't seem like an expensive multiple. If you look at the highlights on the earnings, here's the summary. They had top line growing at 24% year over year. Their Q2 revenue within Search is up 17%.
This is their franchise that it really funds the business. I think it's the most under attack from AI, but they don't see any downside. If anything, it's accelerating. Their cloud business is 82% year over year. $100 billion revenue run right now.