Mark Esper has spent a whole heck of a lot of time in the defense ecosystem. After a decade in uniform in the US Army, he worked as a congressional staffer, a senior policy aide to Sens. Chuck Hagel and Bill Frist, and a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the early 2000s. Then, he […]
If there is one fund that knows how to deploy big-time cash into tech companies, it’s Bessemer Venture Partners. The Silicon Valley fund has about $19B under management, and has invested in tech giants from LinkedIn (everyone’s fav) to Shopify. This year, the fund has turned to defense—specifically, European defense. They led Auterion’s $130M Series […]
If you’ve been in DC anytime in the past few years, you will have heard of Arthur Herman. In case you’re unfamiliar (nerd!), he wrote Freedom’s Forge back in 2012, which has shaped a lot of the First Breakfast-type reindustrialization conversations we’ve been having lately. Sparknotes: The book (if you haven’t read it or have […]
Personally, we would give a lot to be a fly on the wall in the early days of the Defense Innovation Unit (RIP Unit X). Luckily, we know a guy who was there. Enrique Oti—apparently referred to intermittently as “Software Jesus of the Air Force”—was one of the co-founders of DIU, and for much of […]
Some people like to take things slow. Other people—like Mal Crease—prefer everything at full throttle. The founder and CEO of USV company Kraken Technology came into defense from high-speed boat racing in 2020, and has brought the same obsession with speed and performance that once helped him break world records to the world of unmanned […]
If you’re a regular reader of Tectonic, you’ll know that the Navy is majorly changing the way it does things. There’s the Trump administration and SecNav Phelan’s focus on amping up shipbuilding, the push to amp up capabilities by 2027, and—just last week—the introduction of the Naval Rapid Capabilities Office. And that’s just the beginning, […]
In case you didn’t know, the U.S. Army is trying to change the way it does things. Since 2023, under Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, the service has launched a program called Transformation in Contact, which pushes new technology out to soldiers for real-time testing in the field. And in May of this year, […]
Ten years ago, when Pete Newell, Steve Blank, and Joe Felter launched the Hacking for Defense (H4D) course at Stanford, “defense” was still a dirty word in Silicon Valley. Investors were reluctant to put their money into defense tech, engineers were uninterested in the military, and tech companies kept their distance from the DoD. As […]
If you read this newsletter regularly, you’ll know that Anduril has had a hell of a year. In January, the company announced that it’s building a massive, cutting-edge production facility called Arsenal-1, and has since secured major DoD contracts for everything from cUAS, to an Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), to rocket motors. And that’s […]
Chances are, if you’re interested in innovation, you’ve heard of Steve Blank. The entrepreneur, educator, and founding member of the Gordian Knot Center at Stanford University is a legend: he has built company after successful company and helped to develop the “Lean Startup” methodology based on his decades in Silicon Valley. If you’ve ever been […]
