Silicon Valley Invades the Pentagon
A number of articles from the past few months describe how the tech billionaires prepare to invade the Pentagon.
“A lot of us are hoping there’s a revolution coming,” Joe Lonsdale, founder of software company Palantir and startup investor said at a recent defense forum, “where we hold the bureaucracy accountable, where we shock the bureaucracy.”
Palantir and Anduril are the darlings of this movement, and can show a lot of success, winning contract after contract.
The list of companies goes beyond Anduril. Vanity Fair’s Boys and their toys, on the hypermacho, Bible-thumping alt-tech universe trying to take on Silicon Valley—from El Segundo, introduces to a slew of starts ups, most of them in the Southern California El Segundo region: Rainmaker technologies, Valar Atomics, Neros, and Dirac. El Segundo brings a history of defense companies and manufacturing.
The article also introduces a new term: Gundo Bros, a special kind of tech bros: god-loving and patriotic.
Gundo is for hard tech what Florence was for art during the Renaissance
There are of course the skeptics to the drone and AI revolution.
“Warfare is always a human endeavor,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said at the Reagan forum. “My own belief is that the future is really about the most effective human-machine teaming.”
David Allvin appears to be somebody who watched Top Maverick a few too many times. Yet, he is not the only one.
“What’s on Twitter is not based in reality,” Chris Power, founder of Hadrian, which has raised more than $100 million and automates the manufacture of components for military hardware, told Forbes. “Like all great momentum waves and venture capital, you gotta turn hype into reality,” he said. “And it’s mostly determined by how many of the founders are serious versus those that can’t transition from a running start.”
Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Founders Fund who has raised more than $180 million for his space drug-testing company Varda, recently said it more forcefully, dismissing a group of El Segundo-based entrepreneurs as “unserious people,” he wrote on X. “Go do something meaningful with your life before throwing stones.”