The Next Era of Warfare is Here

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Ed Elson** (0:45)
Welcome to the Prof G Markets Founder Series. I'm Ed Elson. For decades, the defense industry was dominated by a small group of legacy contractors, companies like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. They built the aircraft, missiles, and weapons systems that defined American defense. And for years, Silicon Valley largely stayed away.
That is starting to change. A new generation of defense startups is challenging those incumbents, competing for Pentagon contracts with a software first approach, and building AI-powered systems designed for modern warfare. And their systems are being used today on battlefields in both Iran and Ukraine. So we wanted to speak with one of the founders leading that transformation about how AI is reshaping the defense industry, where we should draw the line when it comes to automating warfare, and what it means to entrust America's national defense to a new generation of technology companies. Here is my conversation with Brian Schimpf, co-founder and CEO of Anduril.
Brian, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's great to see you.

**Brian Schimpf** (1:56)
Thanks for having me on.

**Ed Elson** (1:57)
So you are the CEO and the co-founder of what I think people would agree is one of the more controversial startups in America. I eventually want to get to how you think about Anduril's role in national security, in geopolitics and technology. But before we do that, let's just rewind the clock to June of 2017 You and a handful of founders, including Palmer Luckey, who people may know is the founder of Oculus.
You have an idea for a defense tech company. Tell us the origin story of Anduril.

**Brian Schimpf** (2:36)
So several of the co-founders, so Matt Graham, Trey Stevens, we've been longtime friends and had worked together for quite some time. And then Trey had left to go do investing, working at Founders Fund, looking for a defense company to invest in. And at the time, this was 2015, 2016, nobody was touching defense in Silicon Valley. And so we've been talking for years about doing this idea of bringing the best in Silicon Valley technology to the Pentagon. And it seemed like something that was some massive opportunity, massive impact on the mission side, and just nobody was willing to touch it. And so when Palmer was out of Facebook, he was like, all right, let's go. And we got to know him over the years as well.
And so it kind of was this very unique opportunity in terms of the team, the size, and the ambition of what we were trying to do.
And the fact that just nobody would do it. It was just too controversial at the time was actually, I think, a huge advantage for us in terms of being able to work on this problem.

**Ed Elson** (3:48)
Why did you guys want to do it? Why did you guys want to go to that place that many investors and technology founders didn't want to go to?

**Brian Schimpf** (3:56)
So I spent probably about a decade working around the national security space. And when you, big part of the motivation is when you meet these folks working on these problems, they are true believers in what they are doing. The mission is very visceral to them, very real. And providing these soldiers, sailors, airmen with the right capabilities just felt like something that the idea of just not doing it and saying too bad, like you just get what you get, it just didn't make sense to me.
And I think my other view of this has been, the goal of the company is deterrence. The goal of the company is to not get into a conflict. So why do people get into these wars? They think they're going to win. And the history of warfare is often these things are very, whatever your political aims were at the beginning, it's often quite unsatisfying, you don't quite get where you wanted to go.
And so military power, you know, the idea is you want to make it clear what the outcome of these conflicts will be. You want to make it clear that, you know, use of force probably will not succeed, that we want to provide our allies in the United States with the best capability possible to make that very clear. So 2017, it was a very different time, right? We just had not had significant large scale conflict in a very long time. And so it was sort of hard for people to get their head around that this, you know, this could be an issue. Fast forward, you know, nine years, it's a different world, right? We've got multiple hot wars in Europe, or we've got, you know, kind of Russia, Ukraine. We've got everything going on in the Gulf, which has been persistent and, you know, will be for a long time for better or for worse. India and Pakistan, Cambodia and Thailand, lots of, you know, kind of aggression in the South China Sea. Like it's a very different time.