This Autonomous Weapons CEO on the Biggest Misconception About AI | Term Sheet

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Stone Fire Naan is made with real buttermilk and ghee. It's the perfect flatbread for any occasion. I put out Stone Fire Naan with dips at every dinner party. I make naan grilled cheese when my daughter has friends over.

Brian Schimpf (0:37)

I use Stone Fire Naan to reward the humans who do my bidding.

SPEAKER_1 (0:41)

Right, it's perfect for camping trips.

Brian Schimpf (0:44)

Dance for it, feeble mortal.

SPEAKER_1 (0:46)

Sorry, is he talking to me or?

Allie Garfinkle (0:48)

Dance, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Brian Schimpf (0:51)

From our tradition to yours, Stone Fire. Together we naan.

People get nervous around the idea of lethal autonomous weapons. The reality is the US.

Allie Garfinkle (1:01)

The killer robots have been very scared.

Brian Schimpf (1:03)

People are very scared of them, I'm here to tell you. And correctly, if it's done in a completely insane way, it would be a very bad idea.

Allie Garfinkle (1:10)

Today, just five companies build almost all of America's weapons, and modern wars have shown that we may be depleting US munitions faster than we can build them.

Brian Schimpf (1:19)

The volume of weapons that these modern conflicts are consuming is so high.

Allie Garfinkle (1:24)

Anduril, a $61 billion venture-backed company, disrupted the traditional path, gambling its own capital to build AI-powered weapons and software, bringing Silicon Valley speed to the Pentagon. Its revenue is doubling year over year, and the company has billions in contracts with the Army, Navy, and Air Force. So I sat with CEO Brian Schimpf to find out, when the next war comes, can a startup build America's weapons fast enough? I'm Allie Garfinkle, and this is Term Sheet.

So Brian.

Brian Schimpf (1:56)

Hello. Hello.

Allie Garfinkle (1:57)

Hi. You and I spent many hours together. As I was working on the profile of you that is now in this.

This is your face.

Brian Schimpf (2:08)

Pretty cool.

Allie Garfinkle (2:09)

Pretty cool. So we spent a lot of hours together. One thing I really noticed is that you are much more comfortable talking about ideas than talking about yourself. So I wanted to blast right past that right at the beginning now.

Brian Schimpf (2:19)

Yeah.

Allie Garfinkle (2:20)

Existentially, spiritually, whichever way you decide to take it. Who are you?

Brian Schimpf (2:25)

So I think of myself as like, I got two little girls, so I'm a dad. I love that. I've always wanted to be a dad. I loved that part of my life.

And I just think of myself as a builder. I just like to build things. It kind of doesn't matter what. Like, I've been doing it since I've been, you know, a little kid, since I've been like five, and just always building something. And I'm just curious and want to just make something. Like, that's just who I am. Sometimes it's a physical thing, because I'm an engineer. Sometimes it's organizations, just whatever it is.

Allie Garfinkle (2:55)

But I want to go back to the beginning of your career, because you previously were head of engineering at Palantir. And very early on, you told me a story about how you, it wasn't exactly intentional that you became an engineer in the first place. How did it happen?

Brian Schimpf (3:09)

Yeah. So, well, the engineering was kind of always there, but the management side was interesting, where I came in as a forward-deployed engineer, one of the first ones on the team.

Allie Garfinkle (3:21)

Were they even calling it that then?

Brian Schimpf (3:22)

Yeah, yeah. No, Sean had coined it forward-deployed engineer maybe like six months earlier. And I was working for this guy, Mike Schaefer, who I knew in college, a great friend of mine. And I remember just like a handful of months in, he was like, I don't really like managing, you know, more or less you want to swap. And I was like, all right, that sounds good. I ended up turning out, I liked it. I liked, you know, leading teams.

I liked being able to work on a lot of these organization problems that were just, you know, kind of tricky puzzles. And how do you get people to be motivated to do the right things? It's like one thing you learn with engineers is, you know, I see a lot of people who, you know, kind of come from like a business background or whatever.